B. Insofar as the complainant re 2. objects to the proceedings before the German Bundestag, his complaint requesting the scrutiny of an election is unsuccessful. 91 The complaints requesting the scrutiny of an election are well-founded insofar as they complain about the Federal Voting Machines Ordinance permitting the use of computer-controlled voting machines without ensuring effective monitoring of the election act and effective subsequent monitoring of the ascertainment of the result. In this respect, there is a violation of the principle of the public nature of elections under Article 38 of the Basic Law in conjunction with Article 20.1 and 20.2 of the Basic Law. The use of Nedap’s computer-controlled voting machines was also not compatible with the principle of the public nature of elections. Both election errors however do not lead to the elections being declared invalid in the constituencies designated by the complainant. 92 It can remain open whether the constructive characteristics of the voting machines, and hence also the type approvals and the use authorisation, were compatible with the requirements contained in the Federal Voting Machine Ordinance, and in particular in the Guidelines for the Construction of Voting Machines, and with the principles of electoral law under Article 38.1 sentence 1 of the Basic Law. The same applies as to the complaints that the voting machines used had not been subject to adequate official monitoring, that the examination of the samples by the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt and that the type approval procedure had not taken place in public, as well as that the examination reports and documents of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, and the source code of the voting machine software, had not been made available to the public. 93 I. The complaint requesting the scrutiny of an election of the complainant re 2. is unsuccessful insofar as the complainant complains of the length of the proceedings before the German Bundestag and that the Committee for the Scrutiny of Elections had not deliberated in public and wrongly had not set an oral hearing. The complaint that the German Bundestag had not been quorate on accepting the resolution recommendation of the Committee for the Scrutiny of Elections is also not well-founded. 94 In the context of the complaint proceedings, the Federal Constitutional Court reviews the impugned resolution of the German Bundestag in formal and substantive terms. Faults in the proceedings of the German Bundestag, as they are claimed by the complainant, can only be relevant to the complaint if they are material and deprive it of the basis for its decision (see Decisions of the Federal Constitutional Court (Entscheidungen des Bundesverfassungsgerichts – BVerfGE 89, 243 (249); 89, 291 (299)). No such procedural violations are recognisable here. 95 1. Even if the proceedings took more than one year between the submission of the objection to the election and the decision of the German Bundestag, this does not yet 96 20/37

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