The Significance of Void Ballots in West German Elections

Abstract

In the 1961 federal election six per cent of West German voters failed to cast two valid votes under the single-ballot, two-vote German electoral system: 1.3 million voters cast their party list vote invalidly, while almost one million failed to vote validly for a district candidate. Since 1949—and 1953, when the present single-ballot, two-vote system was introduced —the development of the invalid vote has been as shown in Table I. Not only has the total invalid vote increased steadily, despite the counter-movement of first and second vote trends; it has also been exceptionally high in comparison to the Weimar Republic, Imperial Germany and other Western European countries. Thus in pre-Hitler Germany the invalid vote seldom exceeded 1 per cent of the poll. In postwar parliamentary elections in Scandinavia it has not yet exceeded 1 per cent while in Britain, Switzerland and Austria it has approached 2 per cent only in rare instances. In Fourth and Fifth Republic France spoiled and blank ballots have been constant at about 3 per cent of the poll. Only in isolated cases—for example, where compulsory voting is combined with a deep-seated social and political malaise , as in Belgium—has the invalid vote been comparable in proportion to that of Western Germany.