Caution, a warning follows! In the following text, if you are alive and well, you are advised not to use the slipper version of public participation. It is recommended, however, to go for a short walk out of the house on Sunday, September 26th and take part in an event for a few minutes as a participant.
No, it’s not about a church service. What you are being asked to think about is this: Participate in the September 26 elections. Really go choose. Do not do this by postal vote weeks in advance, unless there are health, schedule or other good reasons for doing so. For such cases, postal voting was introduced in 1957 so that everyone can make use of the core right of democracy.
Postal voting is a perfect tool to make voting as easy as possible. But the fact that the term democracy is not an empty phrase is particularly impressively understood on election days by those who make their way to their polling station. Whoever does it meets neighbors who have the same goal.
At the polling station we may, no, even fairly certain that we will meet people whose faces we have already seen among the election workers. Many of those who are responsible for the organization at the polling station probably come from the same area as those who are going to vote. In a polling station you can also have a primordial democratic experience: Shaping democracy sometimes means standing in line.
As a reader, you may find this kind of advice on a direct experience of democracy superfluous because you have already participated in many elections. But ask your grandchildren or your children whether the feeling of “I’m going to vote for the first time today” is or was not a decisive experience. And whether it doesn’t always remain something special because there is no action through which each of us feels as directly as when voting that we have it in our own hands, in the literal sense, of how this country will go on.
Postal voters saved the CDU in Baden-Württenberg in 2011
If you now think: But I also have the feeling if I vote four weeks in advance by letter, then please take a look back. On March 27, 2011, the state parliament of Baden-Württemberg was elected. The incumbent Prime Minister Stefan Mappus was a strong proponent of nuclear energy. Two weeks before the election, the Fukushima nuclear disaster struck after a tsunami.
The CDU lost 5.15 percentage points of the vote in the election, the Greens gained 12.5 percentage points. Although the CDU was criticized for several reasons (Mappus mainly because of “Stuttgart 21”), it can be assumed that many postal voters were unable to take the event in Japan into account when making their decision. The postal voting quota was 16.5 percent. The CDU probably owes it to the postal voters that it did not fall any deeper.
Nobody knows whether something will happen in the next four weeks that could influence the voting decision at federal or state level. After all, two of the three leading parties in the polls were still thinking a few weeks before the election about changing top candidates.
I am a technology author with 8 years of experience in journalism. My writing covers the latest technology advancements and trends, drawing on my expertise in news journalism and social media platforms. I have contributed to major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Reuters.
