Stendal election fraud
As Stendaler electoral fraud is fraud of local elections on May 25, 2014 in Stendal referred. For the city council and district council elections, more postal voting documents were issued to authorized persons than allowed. In addition, powers of attorney were forged and postal voting documents were filled out by third parties. When the postal vote of the city council election was repeated, documents were again manipulated. The city council therefore decided to repeat the election of the Stendal city council in its entirety. The re-election took place on June 21, 2015. The district council of the Stendal district , however, recognized the result of the district council election as valid. Against the repetition of the city council election, allegations of manipulation were again raised.
course
Before the election, forged powers of attorney were issued in the name of the soup manufacturers Antje and Wolfgang Mandelkow and two other people, allegedly authorizing them to collect the postal voting documents for the exhibitor. Company employees fetched the election documents from the town hall and passed them on to the then city councilor Holger Gebhardt (CDU), who filled out the documents in his favor.
In the city council election on May 25, 2014, the CDU was able to gain more than five percentage points compared to the 2009 election and reached 40.7 percent. When the exact results were announced in June 2014, it was found that CDU candidate Holger Gebhardt, who, according to the Volksstimme “is more of a backbencher in the Stendal City Council”, achieved fourth place among all CDU applicants with 837 votes. It was noticeable that Gebhardt is said to have received 689 votes in the postal vote, which would correspond to more than 11 percent of all votes cast by letter. In the 37 polling stations that were used by over 80 percent of voters, however, it received only 148 of around 29,000 votes.
City Returning Officer Axel Kleefeldt (CDU) claimed on June 3, 2014 in front of the election committee that the election had proceeded properly. However, three weeks later he admitted that the city administration had failed to observe that a person entitled to vote can only submit up to four powers of attorney. In Stendal, twelve representatives had collected a total of 189 documents for the city council and district council elections. In one case there were even more than 30 documents.
On July 3, 2014, Carsten Wulfänger (CDU) declared in front of the district council of the Stendal district that “a distortion of the will of the electorate was not recognizable”. Wolfgang Kühnel, district chairman of the CDU, defended the relevant authorized representatives in the district council, to whom many postal voting documents were handed out without permission, but did not mention that he himself was one of them. The district council then decided the validity of the district council election.
At the meeting of the Stendal City Council on July 7, 2014, however, only the CDU and the Greens , who formed a joint parliamentary group, recognized the postal vote of the city council election. The majority from Die Linke , SPD , FDP and Piraten , on the other hand, voted for the postal vote to be repeated. The chairman of the CDU city council faction , Hardy Peter Güssau , spoke out in the debate against the repetition of postal votes and a special committee to investigate electoral fraud and described the repetition decision as “political mobbing ”. City Returning Officer Kleefeldt (CDU) spoke out in favor of declaring the election valid. The regional returning officer , however, had recommended a (partial) repetition.
Prior to that, on July 3, Florian M., who was entitled to vote, had declared in lieu of an oath that he had not signed the postal voting power of attorney presented to him at the postal voting station. The city returning officer thereupon filed a criminal complaint against unknown persons for forgery of documents and election fraud . Florian M. was one of the ten of the 189 alleged postal voters who went to the polling station on election day to vote. There they were refused to vote because they were blocked because they had supposedly already voted by postal vote.
In July 2014, an appointment with the police confirmed that Christine T.'s signature on the power of attorney had also been forged. Since the alleged postal voters denied participation by letter, the postal voting documents received in their name were kept and not taken into account in the counting. In this way, the police could later assign the votes cast by the respective voter. Votes for the CDU were cast on the ballot papers supposedly filled out by T. Christine T. was registered with the job center . CDU city councilor Holger Gebhardt, delegated by the city of Stendal, also worked there at the time. Gebhardt was hired by Mayor Klaus Schmotz (CDU) in the city administration at the end of 2011 - without an internal or external advertisement, which is otherwise mostly common. In the meantime, there has been a criminal complaint against the mayor for abuse of office and granting advantages in office.
Many of the 189 eligible voters, for whom the twelve men and women had collected documents from the town hall, were questioned by the police in the weeks that followed. Many of them also had a connection to the job center. At the beginning of November 2014, searches of Holger Gebhardt's workplace and the CDU office were carried out by the police. In total, the public prosecutor's office investigated more than ten people, including CDU district chief Wolfgang Kühnel and an employee of the CDU office.
On November 8, 2014, Holger Gebhardt announced his resignation from the CDU and his resignation from the city council mandate. The city later also terminated his employment without notice.
CDU state chairman Thomas Webel said at a state party conference in November that there were only a few " black sheep " involved. However, Interior Minister Holger Stahlknecht (CDU) determined a few days later that the deputy head of the Stendal police station investigating the matter was a CDU district council member and board member. Stahlknecht therefore arranged for the investigation to be continued by the Magdeburg Police Department .
When the postal vote was repeated on November 9, 2014, the CDU lost 9 percentage points. Since the by-election was overshadowed by the consequences of the election fraud, the city council had to be completely re-elected on June 21, 2015. The CDU city council described the scandal as "incidents that were committed by an individual".
An employee of the city administration was fired. She is said to have been involved in the election fraud.
In March 2017, Gebhardt was sentenced to two years and six months in prison in around 300 cases by the Stendal district court for voting fraud . The court came to the conclusion that he had worked under pressure from backers. The CDU district executive resigned as a whole. Gebhardt's lawyer appealed against the judgment. In August 2017, the Federal Court of Justice largely rejected the appeal. He only recognized a few cases of forgery, but did not reduce the sentence. The judgment of the regional court is thus final.
At the same time it became known that the public prosecutor's office will start preliminary investigations into possible election fraud in the district elections in autumn 2012. In addition, it became clear during the electoral fraud process that fraud had already occurred in the 2009 local elections. However, these will not be pursued further as they are now legally statute-barred.
Manipulation of the repeat choice
In the run-up to the repetition of the city council election on June 21, 2015, there was again manipulation. The list submitted by the FDP contained more applicants and in a different order than decided by the nomination meeting. This became known through objections from a lawyer and the AfD candidate Tom Klein. Marcus Faber, Stendal district chairman and deputy state chairman of the FDP Saxony-Anhalt , who is also the top candidate of his party for the re-election, described the manipulation of the electoral list as a "stupid procedural error" that was "immediately rectified". According to the documents available to the Volksstimme , Faber, who had acted as secretary when drawing up the list , was approached by an FDP member in this regard weeks beforehand. The city electoral committee subsequently deleted two candidates from the election list of the FDP, which could still run for the repetition of the city council election on June 21, 2015.
Tom Klein raised an objection to the re-election before the Higher Administrative Court . He criticized the fact that the FDP had been allowed to vote in spite of proven manipulation of its election proposal. In addition, the SPD and FDP violated the principle of secret voting when they nominated their candidates . In addition, the top candidate for the FDP, Marcus Faber, was not eligible because he claims that his center of life is not in Stendal, but in Berlin. The objection was dismissed on October 17, 2017 and all of Klein's complaints against the city of Stendal and the proceedings at the FDP and the residence of their candidates were discarded. The re-election remains valid.
Parliament
The election fraud in Stendal was also the subject of a debate in the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt . There were violent allegations against the CDU Saxony-Anhalt . The SPD deputy Tilman Tögel , whose constituency is Stendal, wrote in a Facebook comment that the Stendal CDU should consider renaming itself “ Camorra von der Uchte ” and warned that “swamp, felt and criminal activities” would be given to whoever CDU was choose.
In connection with the election fraud, Hardy Peter Güssau resigned from his office as the President of the State Parliament of Saxony-Anhalt on August 15, 2016 with effect from August 21, 2016.
The state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt set up a committee of inquiry into the fraud in April 2017 .
Web links
- Extensive representation of the case by the people's voice
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ - ( Memento from February 11, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Marc Rath: Election fraud: The two faces of Antje M. volksstimme.de from February 22, 2017, accessed on February 27, 2020
- ↑ Details on the postal voting affair in Stendal. Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk , August 2, 2017, archived from the original on September 29, 2017 ; accessed on October 13, 2017 .
- ^ District office of the CDU in Stendal searched in Volksstimme, online
- ↑ - ( Memento from February 11, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Judgment in the Stendal postal vote affair: Former CDU city councilor Gebhardt has to go to prison. mdr from March 15, 2017, accessed on March 18, 2017
- ^ Volksstimme Magdeburg: Stendal election affair: Ex-city council goes into revision. Retrieved April 10, 2017 .
- ^ Judgment in the Stendal postal voting affair is final. Welt , September 19, 2017, accessed October 13, 2017 .
- ↑ Marc Rath: Now also district election in focus. Retrieved April 10, 2017 .
- ↑ http://www.volksstimme.de/nachrichten/lokal/stendal/1469524_FDP-Spitze-verfaelscht-Wahlliste.html
- ↑ a b http://www.volksstimme.de/nachrichten/lokal/stendal/1471128_Heyy-wie-kommts-das-die-Nr.-18-geaendert-wurde.html
- ↑ http://www.volksstimme.de/nachrichten/lokal/stendal/1471527_Stendals-FDP-verliert-zwei-Kandidaten.html
- ↑ http://www.volksstimme.de/nachrichten/lokal/stendal/1507295_Unregelmaessheiten-bei-der-FDP.html
- ↑ Description at juris.de, accessed on October 20, 2017
- ↑ - ( Memento from February 11, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Comment on Güssau: Unreasonable to the end. Mitteldeutsche Zeitung of August 15, 2016, accessed on August 15, 2016
- ^ Committee of Inquiry: Parliamentary aftermath in the Stendal postal ballot affair. ( Memento from October 13, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) mdr.de from April 5, 2017, accessed on October 13, 2017