After recount, Pirates winning a seat at the local council of Ostermundigen (CH)

The Pirate Party of the Swiss Canton Berne has successfully appealed the official election result in the town of Ostermundigen, which has got its first pirate councilor.

Jorgo Ananiadis (photo CC BY 3.0 Timo Orubolo)

The elections in the town of Ostermundigen (population 17000) has faced a debacle that leaves a lot of question open. On the election day of September 29th, all went well according to the plan, and the final election results have been published right at 19:00. According to it, the Pirate Party has got only seven ballots that had not been altered by the voters (we are not going into much detail here, but the fact that voters have as many votes as there are seats to elect and can alter the ballots and so the votes are counted in two categories, altered and unaltered). This was a devastating blow to the local Pirates who spend a whole lot of time and effort carrying out their election campaign in the time of the coronavirus. But something wasn’t just adding up, as there had been more local pirates actively involved in the campaign that just seven! So the Pirates asked for a plausibility check of the results, and the city has found additional 46 ballots in two envelopes for the Pirates that haven’t been entered into the computer. But even with this rise of nearly 770%, it was still not enough to change the seat distribution. Case closed – better luck next time.

But something was still off, so the Pirates filed an official appeal and a proper recount of all votes was conducted. And even that the recount has not surfaced yet more of the uncounted envelopes full of pirate votes, it was discovered that a total of 78 ballots has been counted for other lists, that has never been there in the first place. And this has changed the election outcome and Jorgo Anniadis got a seat at the big council of the town of Ostermundigen. The town announced that it will look for measures to implement in the future to prevent miscounting of votes.

The newly elected Pirate councilor Jorgo says: “As a result of this election debacle, I will increase my efforts to improve the processes and transparency of elections. Contemporary solutions and better structures will move our administration and the community forward”

It is the first time that the Pirate Party in the Canton of Berne has won a seat at local elections. But since the election results have been changed, the timeframe for appellations has been reset as well, and now other parties could also file complains and requests for even more recounts.