Why (not) vote?

Some 6.2 million voters go to the polls in the ex-communist eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia and the western state of Saarland on Sunday to cast ballots for their state premiers and state parliaments.

In addition, 14.4 million eligible voters are being asked to choose their local mayors and town council representatives in municipal elections in Germany's most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia.

But voter turnout has been on the decline for decades in Germany. In the 1970s, about 80 percent of German voters took part in state elections.

Today, that figure has dwindled to an average of 67 percent. Five years ago, Thuringia, Saxony and Saarland - the three states voting for new state assemblies on Sunday - actually faced historically low turnout levels.

Widespread voter apathy

Richard Hilmer, managing director of Infratest dimap, one of Germany's leading opinion research institutes, said non-voters fall into distinctly different groups.

"There is the notorious non-voter, who actually never casts a ballot," he said. "Others decide every single time whether they are going to participate in the elections or not. And then, there are those who fall victim to a sudden illness or other last-minute problem."

Analysts see a nationwide trend in the decline in voter turnout for state elections. In Saxony-Anhalt in 2006, a mere 44 percent went to the polls, but Hilmer pointed out that this trend was reversible.

The Infratest dimap manager said intense media coverage could influence voter participation, especially since this poll is viewed by many as a barometer of public sentiment for next month's federal election.

"If citizens get the impression that there is a lot at stake in a state election and that their vote might really count, then interest in elections tends to go up."

Fickle voters

Having real political alternatives to vote for can also make a difference, Bernhard Wessels told Deutsche Welle.

The senior researcher from the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) said that international comparative analyses show those are conditions that can be applied to democratic elections in any country. Also, "if elections are close, turnout is higher."

Municipal elections also suffer from low voter participation. If there is a particular issue on hand, the turnout might be quite high, Wessels pointed out, but basically, voters feel that the laws that really affect them are not made on the municipal level.

He said the national polls are regarded as "real elections, where the state of the nation is decided."

For parliamentary elections, Germany is one of the western democracies with the highest voter turnout, Wessels said. Only in countries like Belgium, which has a compulsory voting system, is turnout higher.

In 2005, voter turnout in the German parliamentary election was 77,7 percent – the lowest ever, and Wessels speculated that participation in this year's national polls on September 27 might even be lower, due to "a boring election campaign, and an outcome that seems to be clear to most people, so that it is not an incentive to go out and vote."

But the researcher remained cautious. "The experience in the last elections was that 40 percent of voters switched their opinion in the pre-election period," he said. "That is a lot - from one party to the other, from voting to non-voting, or from non-voting to voting."

db/Nadine Wojcik

Editor: Rick Demarest