Groundhog Day in the Berlin House of Deputies

It was election day in Berlin on Sunday. The last city election didn't run smoothly. (In part due to the concurrent Berlin Marathon, which led to ballot supplies going missing, being delivered to the wrong location, and so on and so forth.) As a result, a court overturned the results and ordered a repeat of the election. So 1 year and a few months after the last one, we toddled off again.

My mother and sister acted as volunteers at polling stations, while my two youngest brothers and I just went off to vote. Volunteers in fluorescent safety vests pointed us along to the right building, where we stepped into a large room with twice as many volunteers as voters. It was a quick procedure to show our voter invitation letter, receive the three folded paper ballots, sit down in a booth, read through the lists of parties and candidates, and put our 'x's beside the candidate of our choice. Then we presented our ID cards, were checked against the voter lists, and dropped our ballots into a box. It appears that a few voting locations had black garbage bins repurposed as ballot boxes just to make sure there was enough capacity, which seems like a disturbing metaphor; but our location had a proper box.

On the way home we walked to two ice cream shops that were closed, then to a third that was open. The brothers had orange-and-basil ice cream with a second scoop of vanilla, while I had caramel ice cream and stracciatella ice cream. It was gloomy late winter weather, but there was still something reviving about the gelato, and a cosy group of diners had gathered inside the intimate space of the gelateria enjoying the more seasonally appropriate food offerings.

Before we'd even left the building to vote, a neighbour had popped out of the other door on our landing, and remarked on the voter envelopes she saw clutched in our hands. She was a polling station volunteer in the centre-north part of the city, she told us before vanishing down the stairs and out the building, and her station was prodigiously overstaffed.

Altogether the election was planned so that little went wrong except that one head volunteer for a polling station overslept. (The elections evidently required being out and about before 7 a.m., so this was no great surprise.)

What actually went wrong from my lefty point of view was that the centre-right Christian Democratic Union won well over 25% of the vote, while the Greens and Social Democratic Party are at below 20% each.

As for my sister and mother, they came home for a 4-hour volunteering break before returning to count ballots until what must have been 9 p.m. or later. I hope they'll be able to catch up on their sleep!