Election securityGermany Fights Cyberattacks and Fraud Claims to Ensure Fair Election
Germany is in the middle of an election year that will see unprecedented use of mail-in ballots as well as hacker attacks against politicians. Election authorities reject claims of potential voter fraud.
German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer has sought to head off far-right claims of voter fraud ahead of Germany’s general election in September while highlighting threats of cyberattacks from both inside and outside Germany.
At a press conference on Wednesday flanked by the heads of Germany’s election authority, domestic intelligence agency, the BfV, and cybersecurity agency, the BSI, Seehofer laid out the security threats to Germany’s election and how the authorities are planning to fend them off.
“Our authorities will do everything thinkable to make sure the Bundestag election will be carried out in an orderly and secure way,” Seehofer told reporters.
But it fell to Federal Returning Officer Georg Thiel, the man charged with overseeing Germany’s elections, to fill in the details, specifically rejecting the claims of potential mail-in voter fraud made by MPs for the far-right AfD party.
Mail-in ballots and voting machines
Much like in the US, the coronavirus pandemic has led to an increase in the number of mail-in votes during 2021, a “super election year” when Germany is staging six state elections and a national election.
This led AfD Bundestag member Stephan Brandner, among others, to speculate openly, without providing evidence, about the possibility of manipulation. As mail-in ballot boxes stand around “for weeks” in town halls across the country, Brandner said, “no one knows what happens to them.”
Thiel was quick to deny any suggestion that mail-in votes are more open to fraud than ballot box votes. “We have had postal votes since 1957,” he said at Wednesday’s press conference. “And in all those years there has been no evidence of widespread manipulation that might in the remotest way have led to a situation where the election was not carried out in a secure and valid way. The ballot boxes for the mail-in votes are treated in the exact same way as the ballot boxes for the in-person votes.”
In Germany, mail-in votes are checked against the voter registry as they arrive and kept in a locked ballot box in a secure location until election day to prevent tampering. The ballot box for in-person votes is also locked and watched by at least three people from the electoral board to make sure no authorized ballots are added. When voting ends at 6 p.m. on election day, the boxes are then opened in the presence of all members of the electoral committee and observers and counted.
