Electoral system of Germany

Common practice is that direct candidates are also placed on the electoral lists at higher rankings as a fall-back in case they do not win their districts.

An election is general if basically every citizen can take part: no restrictions in terms of income, sex, health, or any other arbitrary distinctions.

But according to the jurisdiction of the Federal Constitutional Court, the prescription of a minimum voting age is compatible with the commonalty of the election.

However, the Federal Government (made up of different political parties) is allowed to conduct public relations if its neutrality is strictly preserved.

The German Parliament's voting law even states that no elector is allowed to announce his decision in the polling station.

A new electoral law was enacted in late 2011, but declared unconstitutional once again by the Federal Constitutional Court upon lawsuits from the opposition parties and a group of some 4,000 private citizens.

The Committee for the Scrutiny of Elections only makes sure that the Federal Voting Act is implemented properly; it does not deal with possible unconstitutionalities.

If the Bundestag rejects the veto, an appeal to scrutiny of elections can be lodged to the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany within another two months.

[2] The feminist party Die Frauen even calls all its members women in its bylaws, but claims this term also applies to men.

For the calculation of the electoral threshold, the candidate lists on state level of one party are generally treated as connected, unless the confidants issue a differing declaration to the Federal Returning Officer.

However, these terms refer neither to a hierarchical order of importance of the votes, nor to a logical (chronological) sequence in a valid election process.

Furthermore, votes are spoilt if the voter's intention cannot be recognised without doubt, if the ballot paper contains additions or conditions or if it is not an official document.

The numbers for a total of twelve categories of (partly) invalid ballot papers have been published at last (for the Federal Parliament elections in 2005).

For combinations of invalid and valid votes on a ballot paper, the belonging elected (major) parties have been deciphered as well.

Seats in the German Bundestag are allocated to regional lists of parties that either pass a five percent electoral threshold of the federally valid second votes or win at least three constituencies.

The three-constituency rule was not used again until 1994, when the PDS won four direct mandates in Berlin, enabling them to send 30 delegates to the Bundestag, despite the fact that they had only 4.4% of the second vote.

It was used in the 2021 election, in which PDS's successor, Die Linke, won exactly three constituencies (Berlin-Treptow-Köpenick, Berlin-Lichtenberg, and Leipzig II), earning it 39 seats on 4.9% of the second vote.

This clause is meant to minimise the risk of party fragmentation, which contributed to the incapacitation of the Reichstag in the Weimar Republic.

Presently, the big parties are not considering introducing a majority voting system like they did at the beginning of the first grand coalition in 1966.

The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany has found that this distinctive feature is compatible with the legislator's will of ensuring a regionally balanced composition of the Bundestag.

When the first Grand Coalition (1966–1969) took office, there were strong tendencies within both major parties, CDU and SPD, to abandon proportional representation which had existed/had been applied since the foundation of the German Federal Republic in 1949.

The smaller FDP, which had no chance of winning the majority in an election district, protested because the implementation of this voting system would have threatened its further existence.

Ultimately, however, the introduction of the majority vote system failed because large parts of the SPD were convinced that it would not have meant better prospects of power.

But German lawmakers adopted reforms in May 2013 that sharply reduce this possibility, following a July 2008 decision of the Federal Constitutional Court declaring negative vote weight unconstitutional.

Because the Parliamentary Council couldn't agree on a written formulation of the voting system in the Grundgesetz, the Federal Election Law was ratified by the heads of government of the German states.

The federal territory was divided into 242 electoral districts, each one having one direct candidate being elected according to the relative majority voting, which is still valid.

Accordingly, the five-percent hurdle and the Grundmandat-clause (one direct mandate was sufficient to join the Bundestag) were valid merely in the federal states.

The two-stage distribution of seats connected with states' candidates lists was introduced, which brought along the problem of negative vote weight.

Because of paradoxes that occur in the largest remainder method, the danger of negative vote weight expanded to all federal states, even to those without overhang seats.

Election of the 12th German Bundestag (2 December 1990) – Briefly before the Bundestagswahl of 1990, the Federal Constitutional Court decided that the situation of the recently reunited Germany showed a special case.