From the German Embassy website:
Update: 12 September 2005 – election result delayed:
The death of a German election candidate in the city of Dresden means the final result of the country’s general election will be delayed by two weeks. Voting in Dresden’s 160th district will not take place on the scheduled 18 September election day due to the death of a direct candidate for the right-wing extremist National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), officials said. Nevertheless, Germany’s Constitutional Court has ruled that preliminary election results from the Sept. 18 vote can be released, despite appeals by unnamed citizens that they should be kept secret until Oct. 2 when a by-election in the city of Dresden takes place. Preliminary election results are normally released several hours after polls close at 6 p.m.Voting in Dresden will probably take place on 2 October. This means Germany’s final national election results will be delayed and this will also probably lead to a delay in the election of Germany’s new chancellor in parliament’s lower house, the Bundestag. All other ballots will be counted after polls close on 18 September and a preliminary official result will be released.
DW has a story that says this postponement of voting in district 160 could affect who wins power nationally, if the election is a close as forecast and the national power balance comes down to a single seat.
That seems really unlikely. Remember, under MMP the constituency races do not affect the overall seat total unless a party wins more such seats than its share of the vote would entitle it to. So, unless this turned out to be an “overhang seat” (as explained in the New Zealand post earlier) and the result hinged on one seat, this postponement can’t matter. Unless I am missing the point here.
German Elections
Today is the last day of campainging in what apears to be a very tight contest in Germany (see the BBC: German rivals make one last push).
For more on the German elections, see Fruits and Votes (also here).
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Scion grafted by PoliBlog: Politics is the Master Science — 17 September 2005 @ 09:14