John, they can’t do that. German ballot papers are completely unmarked and anonymous, they can’t be traced back to a specific person. Unlike the UK ones which are numbered (which I always found odd)
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It's called representative electoral statistics ("Repräsentative Wahlstatistik"). Ballot papers in randomly selected voting places get marked with sociodemographic information: about gender and the age group (10 age groups in total). In 2021, 1.9 million eligible voters were included.
I suppose it's widely unknown. I used to work in electoral research, that's how I know about it. And my polling station was selected for the 2021 election. It's a useful tool, especially for longitudinal analysis, as it's been done since 1953.
That's true. I've seen so many charts by @jburnmurdoch.ft.com for the UK and wanted to recreate for Germany, especially in the field of public health, just to find out there's no data.
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They said the records are sealed, securely stored and can only be opened by court order. I think they are destroyed after a given period.
As it's all paper it's fairly hack proof and would be quite a pain to trawl through DOGE style