It is 11:26 am when Ludgera Selting announces the verdict.

"The elections for the 19th House of Representatives and for the district assemblies of September 26, 2021 will be declared invalid in the entire electoral area," says the chairwoman of the Constitutional Court of the State of Berlin in the plenary hall of the Superior Court.

The judges passed the verdict with a clear majority of seven to two votes.

Markus Wehner

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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It's no longer a surprise;

At the end of September, the court made its assessment of the "chaos election" clear in a public hearing.

The presiding judge explains why this decision was necessary from the point of view of the court. The main reason is the “severe systematic deficiencies in election preparation”.

They would have led to a high number of electoral errors, which make last year's Berlin election "a probably unique event in the history of elections in the Federal Republic".

In the opinion of the court, what is decisive is that the election management did not calculate the time required for the election process per voter and the number of polling booths required for this or incorrectly.

The estimated time of three minutes per election process was too short, because six votes had to be cast on five ballot papers for three elections – for the Bundestag, the Berlin House of Representatives and the district councils – as well as for a referendum.

Elected “area-wide” according to the official election time

But even if it had only taken three minutes, only a maximum of 472 people could have voted per polling station.

On the other hand, there were an average of 1,085 eligible voters per polling station.

Only 43 percent of those entitled to vote could have voted in person, with a voting time of five minutes, which the court regards as the minimum, only 26 percent.

With such a small number of voters who wanted to cast their votes in person and not by postal vote, "the state election authority could not count," says Selting.

There were also numerous other mishaps.

Many polling stations soon ran out of ballots, others handed out false ballots from another district.

In the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district, thousands of ballot papers were copied and validated, which was against the regulations.

Due to the conditions described, elections took place after 6:00 p.m., sometimes even after 8:00 p.m., in 1,090 of the 2,256 polling stations.

Around 11 percent of the polling stations were still open after 6:30 p.m., when the forecasts were known for a long time - including the fact that there was a neck-and-neck race between the SPD and the Greens.

For the question of whether an election has to be repeated, not only the number of voting errors is decisive, but also the question of whether they affect the distribution of the seats, the so-called mandate relevance.

In the opinion of the court, it is not a question of whether a different distribution of the seats is “mathematically precise”, but that it is “specifically possible”.

The court listed numerous facts.

Overall, the election process was interrupted for more than 100 hours, after 6 p.m. a total of around 365 hours were still being voted on.

In addition, almost 4,000 ballot papers for the first vote and more than 1,500 for the second vote were not distributed and around 2,000 false ballot papers were issued for the first and second votes.

Possible impact on the allocation of seats

The court assumes that between 20,000 and 30,000 votes cast are affected by electoral errors.

How they would have been distributed may have affected the allocation of seats.

Almost 2,000 more votes would have given the AfD another seat in the House of Representatives.

If the Greens had gotten almost 10,000 more votes, they would have won another seat in the House of Representatives.

A three-digit number of votes for the FDP in Berlin-Charlottenburg would have led to shifts between the various district lists of the party.

The court found that moving seats within a party is also relevant to the mandate.

The elections to the district assemblies should also be repeated simply because, according to the electoral law, they have to take place at the same time as the elections to the House of Representatives.

The re-election must take place no later than 90 days after the date of the verdict.

This should happen on the last possible Sunday within this period, on February 12th.

Then the Berliners will vote again.