can however be left open. It certainly does not justify by itself forgoing any type of verifiability of the election act. Unintentional counting errors or incorrect interpretations of the voters’ intention can also be ruled out by voting machines if supplementary monitoring by the voter, the election bodies or the public is made possible in addition to electronic recording and counting of the votes. Corresponding monitoring is for instance possible with electronic voting machines which record the votes not only in electronic form in the voting machine, but at the same time in a form which is independent of this (see II. 3. a) bb above). Apart from this, user errors – such as pushing the “invalid” key presuming that this made it possible to correct an erroneous entry – cannot be ruled out in the voting machines approved for the elections to the 16th German Bundestag. bb) The principle of the secrecy of elections certainly does not constitute a counter constitutional principle which can be used as a basis for a broad restriction of the controllability of the election act and of the ascertainment of the results. There is no “conflict of interest” between the principle of secret elections and the principle of the public nature of elections which might justify such restrictions (Bundestag document 16/ 3600, Annex 1, p. 20). 130 The principle of secret elections guarantees that the voter alone is aware of the content of his or her election decision, and obliges the legislature to take the necessary steps to protect the election secret (see H.H. Klein, in: Maunz/Dürig, GG, Art. 38, marginal no. 110 [March 2007]; Pieroth, Juristische Schulung – JuS 1991, p. 89 (91)). The secrecy of elections constitutes the most important institutional protection of the freedom of elections (see BVerfGE 99, 1 (13)). In historic terms, secret elections may have been a caesura in the public nature of the election procedure because they renounced the open ballot in order to protect the freedom of election (see Breidenbach/ Blankenagel, Rechtliche Probleme von Internetwahlen, Berlin 2000, pp. 34-35). Under the regime of the Basic Law, which explicitly prescribes elections as secret in order to protect their freedom, however, the principle of the public nature of elections from the outset does not apply to the act of the ballot. If the public nature of the elections is not ruled out in order to enable the ballot to be cast unobserved, the election procedure is subject to the principle of the public nature of elections (see H.H. Klein, in: Maunz/Dürig, GG, Art. 38, marginal no. 113 [March 2007]; Seifert, Bundeswahlrecht, 3rd ed. 1976, Art. 38, marginal no. 35). Accordingly, the impact of the principle of secrecy of elections is not to restrict the principle of the public nature of elections for the ballot act. It also does not justify a restriction of public monitoring in the casting of the – previously secretly marked – vote carrier or in the ascertainment of the results. This already follows from the fact that it does not oppose additional precautions enabling the voter to monitor whether his or her vote is recorded in an unfalsified manner as a basis for a subsequent re-count. 131 cc) Finally, the goal of being able to form a viable people’s representation in a short period does not constitute a restriction of the principle of the public nature of elections in the deployment of computer-controlled voting machines. The clarification of the 132 28/37