District council alliance strengthened: ballot repeated after manipulated postal vote

Only a little more than half of the 13,500 voters in Rüsselsheim who were asked to cast their votes for the district elections again last weekend actually did so.

Due to anomalies in the local elections in March last year, the district council decided to repeat the postal vote.

To avoid manipulation this time, the ballot papers were automatically sent to the postal voters.

However, there will not be any major changes now: the CDU will lose a seat and only have 18 MPs, the SPD will gain a seat and will have 21 MPs in the future, which will strengthen the coalition of SPD, Greens and Left/Open List in the district council.

The trend was already foreseeable on Sunday evening, when all the slips of paper on which only one party was ticked were counted.

That was true of just over half of the ballots.

The rest were accumulated and variegated, which is why the counting continued on Monday.

A year ago, more than 800 postal voting documents were requested via four email addresses, around 400 alone via a single email address.

The electoral office also noticed that the signatures on 172 ballot papers did not match those that were deposited in the residents' registration office.

In addition, many ballot papers were signed in block letters.

So there was quick talk of attempts at manipulation.

The public prosecutor's office in Darmstadt is still investigating nine people in this context, and the investigations are still ongoing.

While only the votes for the district council were cast again at the weekend, there could soon be a similar re-election for the Rüsselsheim city parliament, since the manipulations also extended to this election.

In contrast to the district council, which had new elections in all postal voting districts, the Rüsselsheim parliament only decided to hold new elections for one constituency in the Dicker Busch district, in which there had been a particularly large number of conspicuous polling cards.

On the other hand, the deputy FDP chairman Christoph Böhm complained to the administrative court because he demands a repeat election in all postal voting districts.

A decision by the administrative court is not expected until next year due to the large number of cases pending there.