CONGRESSIONAL STAFF DELEGATION OBSERVES GERMAN ELECTION

UNCLAS FRANKFURT 001576 SIPDIS FOR CA/ACS DEPT FOR EUR/EU AND H E.O. 12958: N/A TAGS: PGOV GE EU SUBJECT: CONGRESSIONAL STAFF DELEGATION OBSERVES GERMAN ELECTION PROCEDURES AS OFFICES GIRD FOR EUROPEAN PARLIAMENTARY VOTE ¶1. (U) SUMMARY: A staff delegation from the House Committee on Administration visited Elections Offices in Frankfurt and Wiesbaden with ConOff to explore German procedures for registering voters and conducting elections on a citywide and national scale. Substantially all eligible German voters are registered through a process of central recordkeeping. In a national vote, such as the June 7 European Parliament elections, a relatively small staff prepares the voter rolls over a period of months, but manages to manually count hundreds of thousands of paper ballots within a few hours of the polls closing. -------------- System Requires Minimum Labor -------------- ¶2. On May 28-29, Consulate General Frankfurt welcomed the bipartisan Congressional staff delegation of Majority Senior Elections Counsel Thomas Hicks, Majority Deputy Staff Director Teri Morgan, Majority Elections Counsels Janelle Hu and Jennifer Daehn and Minority Elections Counsels Peter Schalestock and Karin Moore. The House Committee on Administration directed the delegation to conduct a "comparative review of European countries that have implemented government-initiated, automatic or mandatory voter registration to maintain current and accurate voter rolls." ¶3. The director of the Frankfurt Elections Office (Wahlamt) Hans-Joachim Grochocki told the delegation that virtually every citizen in Germany who is over 18 years old is eligible to vote and is registered when applying for any service of the government at the Citizens Office (Burgeramt). Under German law, every citizen over 16 years of age can register his/her current permanent residence at the local Burgeramt as well as apply for and carry a national citizen identification card (Ausweis). Citizens must register a change of residence at the new location when they move, and thus the registration is continuous throughout life. This framework provides generally comprehensive and current identification information on all citizens. This information in turn can be shared only with those government agencies that have a direct need to know, such as the elections office, schools, social services and police agencies. Regarding grounds for ineligibility to vote, the elections officials said all citizens remain eligible voters, even after criminal convictions, although such voters are not eligible to hold public office. ¶4. Wiesbaden Elections Office representative Wolf told the delegation that Wiesbaden, the capital of the state of Hesse, which also includes Frankfurt, has 275,000 inhabitants and 190,000 eligible voters. (Note: Frankfurt has 600,000 residents and 400,000 eligible voters.) Despite such a high percentage of eligible voters, the Wiesbaden Elections Office has only three full time employees and 10 unpaid volunteers who are currently focused on the June 7 European Parliament elections. According to Mr. Wolf, it takes at least 6 months to prepare the electronic voter rolls. The result is a printed document that is used at the polls to identify every one of the city's eligible voters. -------------- Paper Ballots and Hand Counts -------------- ¶5. Thirty-five days preceding an election, the Elections Office in each city mails to every voter an election card derived from the data in the Burgeramt records together with a printed ballot that now may be returned by mail without having to make a special request to vote by absentee ballot. Although voters are not required to produce the election card at the voting station, they have 21 days to correct any errors on their cards by appearing in person at the Elections Office. (Note: Eligibility to vote is also noted on the Ausweis identification card.) All final handwritten changes are inserted into the printed election books, which are then distributed to the relevant polling places. A local committee of residents at each polling location decides any disputes about the information in the register or discrepancies therein. ¶6. The printed ballots for each election are tallied as they are received by mail at the Elections Office, and a notation is placed in the local book that the citizen has voted. When a citizen appears at the poll, the local register is checked to avoid duplicate voting. After the polls close, the staff and volunteers at the Elections Office publicly count all ballots by hand, rather than electronically. Both Wiesbaden and Frankfurt officials estimated that the counting would be completed within one to three hours. Turnout at the 2004 European Parliament election was 39% in Frankfurt and 37% in Wiesbaden, reflecting a lower interest in the European results than was the case for the Hesse state elections in 2009, when the turnout was 61%, according to the election officials. -------------- Conclusion -------------- ¶7. German election officials at the Frankfurt and Wiesbaden Elections Offices expressed a high degree of confidence in the integrity, completeness and accuracy of their voter registration systems. They each stated that computer hacking into the record systems has not been a problem and the systems have adequate firewalls to protect the data contained therein. They also stressed the need for transparency in the registration process and the counting of ballots. They considered the hand count and paper ballots preferable to electronic measures. ¶8. Staffdel Hicks reviewed the substance of this cable. POWELL