VI. It may remain open whether the further complaints are well-founded. The complainants complain amongst other things that the characteristics of the voting machines and of the software used do not meet the requirements of the Federal Voting Machine Ordinance, in particular the Guidelines for the Construction of Voting Machines (Annex 1 to § 2 of the Federal Voting Machine Ordinance). The voting machines used were also said not to have been subject to sufficient official monitoring and examination of the samples by the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, and that the type approval procedure should have been designed differently. The complainants hence ultimately object to the deployment of the computer-controlled voting machines used in the elections to the 16th German Bundestag. Even if these complaints were well-founded, in addition to the finding of the violation of the principle of the public nature of elections from Article 38 in conjunction with Article 20.1 and 20.2 of the Basic Law, these election errors would not take on any particular weight. 159 VII. The election errors that were ascertained do not lead to the complaints requesting the scrutiny of an election being permitted or to the repetition of the elections in the constituencies designated. 160 1. The election error emerging from the fact that the type approvals for Nedap computer-controlled voting machines were granted, that the use of these voting machines in the elections to the 16th German Bundestag was approved and that the voting machines were indeed deployed in the elections without an effective legal basis, has no relevance to mandates. Approval and use of voting machines despite inadequate design of the legal basis do not lead as such to an influence on the election result. 161 2. The election error emerging from the fact that computer-controlled voting machines were approved and deployed the characteristics of which were not compatible with the requirements of effective verifiability of the election events, even if its relevance to mandates were to be assumed, does not lead to a partial declaration of invalidity of the elections to the 16th German Bundestag. 162 a) In the cases in which an election error may have had an impact on the distribution of mandates in the Bundestag, the election scrutiny decision of the Federal Constitutional Court is subject to the principle of the least incisive encroachment. The decision may only go so far as is demanded by the election error that has been ascertained. In principle, the requirement of the protection of the status quo of an elected people’s representation (see BVerfGE 89, 243 (253)), which finds its legal basis in the principle of democracy, must be weighed up with the impact of the election error that has been ascertained. Simple influences on the election carrying no weight whatever do not therefore lead to the invalidity of an election. The encroachment on the composition of an elected people’s representation by a decision under the law that regulates the 163 35/37