All eyes turn to Dresden

For those of you not particularly interested in elections even in your home countries, please forgive the next few days of blog posting as there will probably be a higher number of posts pertaining to Sunday's election for German Chancellor. I am reminded that the rules for elections can differ significantly... even within democratic nations.

Take this example...

Germany's highest court has ruled that preliminary official results from Sunday's general election should be released on Sunday and not kept secret until a deferred by-election two weeks later. Apparently, a by-election in the eastern city of Dresden has been triggered by the death of a far-right parliamentary candidate from the NPD party. Not even a candidate for Chancellor! As far as I can understand, German election law requires a separate election to be held in the event of a candidate's death, with this election coming about 2 weeks later. A replacement has already been found for the candidate who died, but there isn't enough time to reprint ballots before Sunday.



Very interesting...continuing on....

The German constitutional court (Supreme Court equivalent, I believe) rejected appeals by unnamed citizens demanding the preliminary results, usually published several hours after polls close at 6 p.m., be kept under wraps until after an October 2nd by-election in one of the country's 299 election districts.

Translated: a certain subset of German citizens will be required to wait 2 weeks to cast their vote for German Chancellor (highest elected official in Germany), but the results of the election held on September 18th will be made public anyway.

A few initial thoughts:
(1) Why bother going to the polls 2 weeks later?
(2) If it is a tight race (as has been predicted), do the candidates still get to "campaign" for two weeks after to "get out the vote in this one remaining district?

German politicians and legal experts are now starting to comment that a delayed election could throw into question the legality of the national vote. Could this be the next political election hot potato, supplanting the "hanging-chad/pregnant-chad" debacle in the US Bush-Gore election?