Although the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party secured a first-place finish in the Saxony elections on Sunday, the party is still launching an investigation into an alleged computer error that cost them a seat in parliament and is also calling for an end to mail-in votes, citing security concerns and shady practices.
The first issue is the alleged software glitch that resulted in the AfD and the Christian Democrats (CDU) both losing a seat, while the Greens and Social Democrats (SPD) both gained one seat. The party says that it is launching an investigation into this.
“We want to know exactly what went wrong,” said the AfD’s state and parliamentary group leader Jörg Urban in a statement. He is demanding an exact error analysis. “If there are any irregularities, we will take legal action.”
Notably, the loss of one seat resulted in the AfD losing its blocking majority, which would have allowed the party, for example, to block the appointment of certain judges in the state.
The error initially gave the AfD and CDU an incorrect number of seats. After a review, “the state election management corrected the allocation of seats,” according to the German news outlet Leipziger Volkzeitung.
Urban said that nobody is being accused of manipulating the vote, but, “in this case, it is about the AfD’s political options in the Saxon state parliament. Any doubt about the final election result must therefore be ruled out,” he said.
Regardless of why the error came about, Saxony’s election commission suffered a serious black eye, casting doubt on the election results during an already polarized election.
Following the results in Thuringia and Saxony, AfD co-leader, Tino Chrupalla, is calling for an end to mail-in ballots. He discussed his concerns about this form of voting during a conference with top AfD officials.
“It is also the task of the opposition to always doubt what a government is doing or what happened in an election. That is also a legitimate right and that is a good thing. And I just really want to point out, and we will also question this, for example, the entire security for the legal storage of ballot boxes, some of which are not stored in a legally secure manner, where in some cases only one person or two have access to these ballot boxes,” he said.
He went on to say that postal voting has been a concern in other elections and that these issues keep coming up. However, he also pointed to a problem plaguing other countries like the United States, which instituted mass mail-in ballots in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, which involves activists entering retirement homes and potentially manipulating vulnerable elderly voters.
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