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“I’m the winner!”
“No I’m the winner!”
This sort of thing happens with monotonous regularity in Mainz.
State elections on Sunday and these two went head to head in one of Mainz’s voting precincts.
Doris Ahnen wins by 13 votes, the head electoral honcho (same party as the winner, but I’m not suggesting that party affiliations played a role. Moi?) rules out a recount (by a 0.04% margin? Hello?), so it’s “Goodbye Wolfgang”
Next day, someone does a validity check and thinks “Funny, no absentee votes at such and such a voting location”, someone goes over to have a nosey around and thinks “Funny, what’s this here box?”
Turns out to contain 223 absentee votes, 3 of which are invalid and the rest go to Wolfgang by a margin of 32, giving him an overall lead of 19 and a seat in parliament.
Doris slips in by virtue of her position on the party list (a feature of the proportional representation voting system) and the poor bugger from the CDU in Trier who THOUGHT he had a seat by virtue of the party list suddenly didn’t.
And then there’s the candidate from the Pirate Party, Antje Krause aka fishandchips who did exceptionally well with 3.4% (up there with established parties like the FDP and Die Linke).
Not that she gets a favourable mention in the paper, of course…
Mainz Daily Photo 
>I can't remember much of that sort of thing happening here. The votes are counted when representatives of all parties are present and actively monitoring the process. No "what's this box here?" stuff ever happens here. Is it that complicated?
>And not a 'chad' in sight…Is this a story of Mainz inefficiency (to miss a box of ballot papers) or efficiency (to find the box after all)?And a win-win outcome, except for fishandchips (commiserations).
>Sounds like politics as usual.
>Don't talk to us about political funny business JB. We wrote that book over here.V