Never before have so many Munich residents voted before the federal election as in 2021. The ballot papers are stored in a huge hall until they are counted.
Munich - Leo Beck stands between long rows of bright yellow ballot boxes.
The urns look like the yellow bin, only with a slit in the lid.
However, there is no plastic waste stored there, but the will of the Munich voters *.
There are exactly 463 urns - one for each constituency.
Beck, 60, is managing director in the district administration department, with a large team responsible for the federal elections - and for ensuring that the postal voting documents * are safe.
The city has a secret hall for this in an industrial park in the north of Munich *.
Hundreds of thousands of letters are stored there.
Bundestag election 2021: This is where postal voting documents are stored in Munich
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Bundestag election in Munich: helpers sort the letters by hand in the right districts.
© Marcus sleep
On Thursday there were already 365,000. "The postal vote is definitely safe," Beck says right away. The building is guarded, and whoever has applied for a postal vote is listed in the lists of the helpers in the polling stations. So it is not possible for someone to vote twice, says Beck. All postal voting documents also have a barcode, which can be used to assign them to the correct postal voting district.
Beck emphasizes this for a reason.
Postal voting is more important than ever since postal voting was introduced in 1957. According to the Federal Returning Officer Georg Thiel, at least 40 percent of citizens will vote by postal vote, rather more.
In 2017 it was 28.6 percent.
"We are assuming a doubling," says Thiel.
A look at Munich * confirms this. 923 135 people from Munich are allowed to vote on Sunday, around 500,000 of whom have requested postal votes.
Bundestag election: Secret postal voting camp in Munich - move to Freimann planned
In order for the count to go well, the hall in the north of Munich has been preparing for weeks. Every day a mail van brings election letters. Beck reports that Swiss Post has special staff on duty in the mail center. The polling letters would be pre-sorted according to constituencies on their own streets. The helpers in the hall check the sorting. Huge tables serve as a sorting aid. The district numbers are stuck on there and incorrectly mixed letters are assigned to the correct district here. Then the letters end up in their urn.
The move to the MOC-Center Freimann * is on Saturday.
There the letters are counted.
"We are relocating all of the logistics there and rebuilding everything because we still get letters at the weekend," says Beck.
3725 of the approximately 8100 election workers will open the letters here on Sunday evening and count crosses.
Beck also organized the live voting at the 463 polling stations.
The yellow ballot boxes with the ballot papers were brought to the bars in the middle of the week.
Bundestag election: Postal voting is also possible on election day - election mailboxes in Munich
Incidentally, postal voters can also vote at the last minute.
The city has set up twelve election mailboxes for this purpose.
(Locations: www.muenchen.de).
There are scenes that can sometimes be filmed there: people jumping out of the taxi at 5:59 p.m. and jumping to the urn.
At 6 p.m. on the dot there is a shift at the urn.
There is a driver at every mailbox who brings the mail to the vocational training center on Lindwurmstrasse.
There the stragglers are counted.
All election documents will be kept until the next federal election - as long as election contests are possible.
They are stored in the secret hall in the north of Munich.
(wha)
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