Where the complainant was complaining about a shift of state tasks towards private
parties, this was said not to constitute an electoral error, even if the submission was
assumed to be correct. In particular, the fact that the preparation and implementation
of elections was a public task did not force the conclusion to be drawn that all necessary acts may only be carried out by officials. The necessary state control was said to
be ensured.
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Since no electoral error was therefore ascertainable, it was said not to be necessary
to investigate any impact on the result of the ballot and on the distribution of seats in
the German Bundestag. No oral hearing was set regarding the objection of the complainant re 2. according to § 6.1a no. 3 of the Law on the Scrutiny of Elections (Wahlprüfungsgesetz – WahlPrüfG), old version.
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b) Both complainants have submitted a complaint requesting the scrutiny of an election to the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht).
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aa) The complainant re 1. moves to rescind the resolution of the German Bundestag
of 14 December 2006 and to declare the elections to the 16th German Bundestag invalid in the constituencies referred to in the objection procedure insofar as computercontrolled voting machines were used there, and to order a repeat of the elections
with voting slips and ballot boxes. Alternatively, he moves for a finding that the use of
software-controlled voting machines in elections to the German Bundestag is not
compatible with the Basic Law, furthermore as an alternative that the deployment of
voting machines is not compatible with the Basic Law unless the transparency of the
elections for the public, the examinability of the correctness of the election result and
security against manipulation is guaranteed in a manner corresponding to elections
with voting slips and ballot boxes.
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The complainant re 1. repeats and expands his submission from the objection procedure, and submits the following as a supplement:
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The deployment of the electronic voting machines, because of their technical and
constructional security faults, was said to have violated the principles of electoral law
set out in Article 38 of the Basic Law, the unwritten constitutional principles within
electoral law of the public and official nature of elections, as well as the nonconstitutional provisions of electoral law.
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The public nature of the elections was also said to have been violated by virtue of
the fact that the monitoring had been shifted to a non-public approval procedure and
the publication of the examination results, examination documents, construction characteristics and of the source code of the devices had been refused. An evaluation of
the votes cast that was verifiable by the public was said not to be possible because
the individual votes could not be physically recorded.
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The Federal Voting Machine Ordinance was said to contain serious faults insofar as
it built on the principle of the declaration of identity; for there was said to be no monitoring as to whether the devices actually used corresponded to the software and
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15/37