Perforated ballot papers caused confusion in Zug municipalities
Published: Monday, Jun 10th 2024, 16:40
Back to Live Feed
Perforated ballot papers caused irregularities in the counting of the transparency initiative in some Zug municipalities on Sunday. As a result, the Zug government declared the vote invalid.
"The problem lay with the municipalities," confirmed Zug cantonal councillor Andreas Hostettler to the Keystone-SDA news agency on Monday. They had failed to count the invalid ballot papers during the count, as Hostettler had already told the Tages-Anzeiger newspaper.
The ballot paper consisted of three parts: one for the transparency initiative, one for the counter-proposal and one for the run-off question. In order for the vote to be valid, all three ballot papers had to be returned. According to Hostettler, the municipalities should have checked whether all three ballot papers were present when opening the ballot envelopes. This was not done and could not be traced back later.
Another problem was that if three people each submitted only one partial ballot, they could offset each other, said Hostettler. If they balanced each other out, this resulted in a valid vote - although all three votes should have been invalid.
Hostettler did not want to provide any information on which municipalities had counted correctly and which had not. The government would provide official information on Wednesday.
The Young Alternative's constitutional initiative includes the disclosure of the financing of the political parties represented in the cantonal council, their campaigns with regard to cantonal elections and votes, as well as the disclosure of the interests of office holders and candidates. The government and parliament had drawn up a counter-proposal to this.
©Keystone/SDA
English 
German 
French 
Spanish 
Arabic