In the 2021 federal election, the proportion of postal voters will be high.
This can have an impact on the initial forecasts of the election result.
Berlin - at 6 p.m. the time has come.
Then the first prognoses on the outcome of the Bundestag election will be published.
The forecasts are based on representative post-election surveys on election day.
For this purpose, the voters are interviewed after leaving the polling station.
The votes of postal voters are of course not recorded directly - and only taken into account in their assumed deviations from the behavior of voters in the polling stations.
This can have consequences for the informative value of the first forecast, especially if there is a high number of postal votes.
Bundestag elections: First prognoses on the result - therefore larger fluctuations are possible in 2021
As a spokeswoman for the Infratest institute dimap
zeit.de
explained, the 6 p.m. forecast also includes the possible differences between postal and ballot box voters, and experiences with past elections and pre-election surveys are not disregarded. Nevertheless, a high proportion of postal voters is expected for the 2021 federal election. This fact will influence the forecast: "The 6 o'clock numbers can show a slightly larger difference to the final result than four years ago," said the spokeswoman
.
But one thing is also certain: the later the evening, the more precise the result will be. The first results from selected polling stations will be included in the projections after the first forecast. Some postal voting results are already included in these results. It remains to be seen the influence of the postal vote on the first forecast regarding the results for the AfD. Since they specifically speak out against the use of postal voting, it is possible that the majority of their supporters will vote on site. As a result, they would then automatically be more represented in the by-election surveys for the first forecast.
Experts also attribute the high percentage of postal votes to the corona pandemic.
Federal Returning Officer Georg Thiel recently assumed a share of over 40 percent.
He even considers it possible to double the number of elections in 2017 (29 percent).
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