Vienna elections: vote-by-mail scrutiny could take until Wednesday – Vienna elections

Counting of around 300,000 postal ballots cast during the Vienna city council elections continues. The 23 district electoral authorities have been evaluating the record number of voting cards that have arrived since Monday morning. No end in sight for the night yet. The overall result, including the voting cards, will be available Tuesday at the earliest, perhaps not until Wednesday, he said Monday night in the city council’s elections department.

In the best case, the results of the first district representation could be finalized by Tuesday night and will be released immediately. Because the free election of the 23 district parliaments is considered an individual election and is therefore also published independently of each other. However, for city council elections, the results of the 23 districts will only be announced when everything has been counted.

And that could even last until Wednesday. Because the electoral authorities of 23 districts have to evaluate this year’s huge mountain of more than 300,000 voting cards for the elections of municipal councils and districts and the preferential votes for both elections, and all this in strict compliance with the protective measures of the crown. For comparison: 1,494 district election authorities were responsible for counting the roughly 418,000 votes from the ballot box on Sunday night. And although there were fewer votes than in the previous elections, it took two hours longer than usual, that is, until after 10 p.m.

Even if there are as many as ever before, this year postal voters, according to estimators, will not change anything decisive in the outcome of the elections: the SPÖ will emerge as the undisputed first of the elections, and Mayor Michael Ludwig has three coalition options : As before with the Greens, as before with the ÖVP or now with the NEOS.

At over 40 percent, the SPÖ is twice as strong as the second strongest party, which is no longer the massively collapsed FPÖ, but the ÖVP. This more than doubled his share of the votes, jumped from fourth to second place, but will not exceed 20 percent. Third are the Greens, who are up a bit, but will likely remain below their strongest result to date of 14.6 percent. The HC team missed the five percent hurdle.

The race for fourth place is still a bit exciting: in the polls, the FPÖ (with 8.9 percent) were well ahead of the NEOS (6.9 percent). But the SORA supercomputers assume that NEOS will outperform the FPÖ with the mail vote count. The ARGE Wahlen, however, sees NEOS a bit weaker than the FPÖ, even in the full result.

Postal voters could still change a few things in district council elections: Josefstadt, for example, might finally go to the Greens, even though the ÖVP was a small margin ahead of voters at the polls.