hardware checked by the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt. It was said not to be compatible with the principle of official nature of the implementation of the election for the state election authorities to relinquish control over the entire course of events, including the technical details. Democracy and the rule of law were said rather to demand that the entire election events, ranging into the ramifications of the technical details, could be traced both by state bodies and by the people. The design of the election procedure, the monitoring and the parliamentary and judicial examinability of the election results, were said to be subject to the state’s reserve as core state tasks. 70 The technical and constructional security faults in the voting machines were said to violate the principles of electoral law as to the freedom, equality and secrecy of the elections. If votes were diverted, electronically “caught” and “spied on”, the freedom of the elections was said to be placed at risk. Equality was also said to be affected if it was not sure whether the vote that had been cast had been counted at all, and if so whether it was counted correctly. What is more, it was said that the secrecy of elections could suffer damage were manipulations to occur. It was said to be sufficient for a violation of the principles of electoral law that a situation had been created by the deployment of electronic voting machines in which the errors described were possible. 71 The restrictions of the principles of electoral law were said not to be justified by contrary constitutional provisions. Nedap’s company secrecy interests that are protected by fundamental rights had to be subordinated to the interest of the public in information and to the public monitoring which was fundamental to democracy. The gain in democracy (rapidity of ascertaining the election results and increased level of security of the election procedure), linked with the deployment of computer-controlled voting machines, was also said to be unable to justify the impairment of public elections. 72 The election errors were said to be relevant to mandates. Major alterations were said to be possible in the mandate structure because of the major part of the votes affected by the election errors. The complainant re 1. was said not to bear the burden of proof for the elections having led to a different result without voting machines than had in fact been the case in the constituencies in which voting machines had been deployed. For the election errors which had been complained of, in particular the violation of the principle of the public nature of elections, were said to have eliminated the actual possibility to demonstrate a manipulation in concrete terms. 73 bb) The complainant re 2. is essentially moving to rescind the rejection of his objection by the German Bundestag and to repeat the elections in the constituencies designated in the written objection of 15 October 2005, as well as basically to establish the unconstitutionality of § 35 of the Federal Electoral Act and the Federal Voting Machine Ordinance. 74 The complainant re 2. challenges both the constitutionality of the legal basis for the 75 16/37