German polls: Laschet commits ballot blunder
THE FAUX PAS SET OFF A TWITTER STORM WITH SOME CALLING IT AN “OWN GOAL” FOR LASCHET, ALTHOUGH ELECTORAL COMMISSION CHIEF SAID THE BALLOT WAS STILL VALID
AACHEN, GERMANY: The conservative candidate to succeed Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany’s general elections, Armin Laschet, on Sunday folded his ballot with his choices visible in a final blunder of a rocky campaign.
Laschet voted in the normally secret polls for his and Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in his hometown of Aachen.
The election rules dictate that the ballot “must be folded in a way so that the choices cannot be seen” so as not to influence other voters.
The faux pas before live cameras set off a Twitter storm, with some calling it an “own goal” for Laschet, although electoral commission chief Georg Thiel later said the ballot was still valid.
“A nationally known politician voted, as expected, for his own party,” Thiel tweeted. “This would not influence voters.”
Greens Party candidate hopeful of more votes The environmentalist Greens’ candidate to be the next German chancellor says she’s hoping for “a few more votes” than pre-election polls showed her party getting.
Annalena Baerbock is the party’s first candidate for chancellor.
It led in polls after she was nominated in the spring but recent surveys have shown it in third place, several points behind the center-left Social Democrats and outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Union bloc.
Baerbock said as she voted in Potsdam, just outside Berlin, that “we are of course hoping for a few more votes, with a view to the poll results, so that we can achieve a real new departure in this country”.