Mayor Klingebiel: "We all very much regret the incidents that some voters and some local electoral boards had to experience and suffer on Sunday. Our top priority was and is a complete and transparent clarification of the factual and legal situation. The fact that there were shortages of ballot papers at several local polling stations should not really have happened. Unfortunately, it did. We can only apologize for this. In the end, the Bundestag will have to decide what impact the electoral errors identified - on the basis of the evaluated election records of the electoral boards - will have. From our point of view, the errors are more than regrettable, but are unlikely to have any relevant impact on the election result."

The fact is that the number of ballot papers was small in relation to the number of eligible voters. Based on experience from previous years and taking into account the fact that a very high voter turnout was to be expected in the upcoming Bundestagswahl, 61,500 ballot papers were ordered. A total of 68,176 people were entitled to vote in Salzgitter.

Around 52,173 people exercised their right to vote. This meant that there were still ballot papers left over at the end of the election Sunday. Nevertheless, there were bottlenecks in some of the 100 polling stations.

How significant were these bottlenecks really?

City Chief Electoral Officer Michael Tacke explains: "The minutes of the election committees, which we have been working hard to review and evaluate since the anomalies became known, provide reliable information on this.

According to these, the entire voting process ran smoothly in 77 polling stations, but there were ballot shortages in 23 polling stations*, most of which were only of a temporary nature.

Mayor Klingebiel: "At this point, I would like to expressly thank the volunteer electoral boards and their respective teams on site, who mastered this situation with great personal commitment, asked for understanding and put those waiting off or even wrote down their contact details and contacted them again later. In the end, there were actually 6 electoral boards who had to document in their minutes that in individual cases voting was not possible."

City electoral officer Tacke added: "It was documented in the minutes that 34 eligible voters were unable to exercise their right to vote. Whether other eligible voters were also unable to exercise their right to vote has not been recorded and cannot be assessed."

Klingebiel: "In addition to a complete clarification of the facts, it is now also important to learn from this misjudgement and the isolated communication and logistics problems that occurred. In future, 100 percent plus sum x of those entitled to vote in the district will be available at each individual polling station from the outset. This will avoid distribution problems such as those that occurred for the first time during the Bundestagswahl. And the communication and logistics channels on election day will be set up in such a way that we remain capable of acting at all times, even in crises like this one."

* Additional information: The transcripts of these 23 polling stations were sent today to the state election officer Markus Steinmetz and the district election officer Heiko Beddig.