The Morning Dispatch: Germany Inches Left in Parliamentary Election

Happy Monday! We are not going to talk about yesterday’s football games.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Preliminary results from Germany’s election over the weekend show the center-left Social Democratic Party eking out a narrow win over longtime German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, 25.7 percent to 24.1 percent. Because the race was so close, the Social Democrats will need to build a coalition with other parties to form a government, a process that could take weeks, if not months.

• Amid intra-Democratic party squabbles, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced last night that the House will vote on the Senate’s bipartisan infrastructure package on Thursday, breaking her promise with moderates in her caucus to hold a vote on the deal by September 27. “I’m never bringing a bill to the floor that doesn’t have the votes,” she told ABC News yesterday. “We’re going to pass the bill this week.”

• The Justice Department announced Friday it had come to an agreement with Huawei Technologies Chief Financial Officer Wanzhou Meng, detained in Canada since 2018 on behalf of the United States, whereby she can return home to China—and have the wire and bank fraud charges against her dropped—in exchange for admitting to misrepresenting the nature of Huawei’s operations in Iran. Two Canadians detained in China since 2018 on dubious charges of “endangering national security” were released as part of the deal.

• Centers for Disease Control Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky on Friday defended her decision to overrule the CDC’s advisory committee and recommend COVID-19 vaccine booster shots to those “in high risk occupational and institutional settings” in addition to people over 65 or who are immunocompromised. “This was a scientific close call,” she said. “It’s my job to recognize where our actions can have the greatest impact.”

• The Chinese Communist Party cracked down further on cryptocurrencies Friday, declaring essentially all crypto transactions and mining illegal. “This is really about establishing a state monopoly in payments,” the Cato Institute’s George Selgin told The New York Times. “The most obvious implication is that the state will have more opportunities to monitor citizens’ economic activity.”

• Treasury Department officials said on Friday that state and local governments had, at the end of August, disbursed less than 17 percent of the tens of billions of dollars Congress allocated for rental aid. With the Biden administration’s eviction moratorium deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo told state and local officials the department will “reallocate” federal money away from localities that have “failed to demonstrate progress in using [their] funds.”

• The House voted 218-211 on Friday to advance the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would prohibit many state-level restrictions on abortion and, Democrats argue, “codify” Roe v. Wade into federal law. All but one Democrat voted for the measure, which will not pass the Senate.

• Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa announced Friday he will run for an eighth term next year against former Democratic Rep. Abby Finkenauer. Grassley will be 89 years old on Election Day 2022.

Social Democrats Expected to Eke a Win in Germany

After 16 years of Angela Merkel at the helm, German voters cast their ballots yesterday in the race to determine her successor. By a narrow margin—and one that could change given this election’s widespread use of mail-in ballots—the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) is expected to secure a plurality of seats in Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, and therefore have a leg up in negotiations to form a new government, which could take months.

German elections are unique—and not just because the country is a multi-party, parliamentary republic. Germans get two votes, neither of which goes toward electing a chancellor directly. The first, like congressional races in the United States, is for an individual member of Parliament from one’s district. But separately, Germans also vote for a political party—and it doesn’t have to be the party of the representative they supported on question one. The directly elected representatives make up about half of the Bundestag, and parties are allocated proportional representation from question two to constitute the other half. Parties must receive at least 5 percent of the vote to qualify for proportional representation.

As of early Monday morning, preliminary results released by the Bundeswahlleiter show the SPD at 25.7 percent, just ahead of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU)’s 24.1 percent. The Green Party secured nearly 15 percent of the seats, the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) 11.5 percent, the far-right Alternative for Germany 10.3 percent, and the far-left Die Linke 4.9 percent. 

If the preliminary results are accurate, the rise of smaller parties contributed to the CDU’s lowest vote share in an election since World War II. Though neither the SPD or CDU even came close to securing the majority necessary to form a coalition, each will now try to engage those smaller parties with the goal of forming a government and appointing their picks—announced in advance—for the chancellorship.

The likeliest next chancellor, SPD’s Olaf Scholz, is a career politician, and is seen as a relatively agreeable, if underwhelming, choice. “The voters decided that social democracy is on the up, and that’s a huge success,” Scholz told supporters Sunday night. “We’re a pragmatic party; we know how to govern. We’re an optimistic party that wants to push for a better future. We have what it takes to govern a country.”

While the country’s slight shift to the left indicates a break from the status quo, Merkel’s high approval ratings reveal another trend: German voters like consistency. The outgoing chancellor—who announced back in 2018 that she’d be stepping down in 2021–served as an island of stability for Germany during her time in office, guiding the country through the European debt crisis, an influx of Syrian and Afghan refugees, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Armin Laschet, chosen candidate of the conservative coalition, was dogged by a few scandals throughout the campaign. He was filmed appearing to laugh in the background of an event honoring those who lost their lives in Europe’s catastrophic floods over the summer, and shortly afterward apologized after accusations he plagiarized author Karsten Weitzenegger in his 2009 book on immigration. 

Both the AfD and Linke parties are likely too politically toxic for the more centrist parties to team up with them, but Green Party officials have alluded to possible plans to join forces with the SDP during coalition negotiations. Their pick for the chancellorship, Annalena Baerbock, gave the party a boost in popularity after her candidacy was announced. While Baerbock conceded yesterday that the Greens had fallen well short of the threshold likely needed to appoint a chancellors, she argued that its gains indicated that the German electorate wants a government dedicated to tackling climate issues. 

Indeed, mass demonstrations and local gatherings in protest of climate change swept the country over the summer, particularly in the wake of July’s flooding. Some polls have further identified climate as the single most important issue for German voters in this election, though Baerbock’s recently unearthed personal scandals—also including a plagiarism allegation—sunk the Greens’ shot in the elections.

The Arizona Review Was Never About ‘Finding the Truth’

Late Thursday night, word leaked out that Arizona Republicans’ partisan review of Maricopa County’s 2020 presidential election results was complete—and that their review had again found that Joe Biden had carried the state. “There were no substantial differences between the hand count of the ballots provided and the official election canvass results for Maricopa County,” the accompanying report reads. “There is no reliable evidence that the paper ballots were altered to any material degree.”

The report continues, however, to recommend that Arizona’s legislature “tighten up the election process to provide additional certainty going forward,” and former President Donald Trump falsely claimed that as proof of his win. “The leaked report conclusively shows there were enough fraudulent votes, mystery votes, and fake votes to change the outcome of the election 4 or 5 times over,” he said in a statement. The Dispatch’s Khaya Himmelman has been fact-checking election disinformation for almost a year now, so she was the perfect person to write this piece for the site breaking down the review, what it means, and what comes next.

The review’s organizers are still crying foul about the 2020 election even though their count confirmed the results.

On Thursday, five months after Arizona Republicans initiated a partisan “audit” of Maricopa County’s 2.1 million ballots from the 2020 presidential election, the firm hired to carry out the recount released its report. The report failed to provide any evidence of a stolen election and actually found 360 more votes for President Biden. Meanwhile, election experts warn that the faux “audit” that led to the error-riddled report was “dangerous” and a “disinformation campaign.”

The audit began on April 23 and was conducted by Florida cybersecurity firm Cyber Ninjas, a company that does not specialize in election security and whose CEO has a history of promoting baseless claims of voter fraud. The report was supposed to be released in August, but was delayed after Cyber Ninjas President Doug Logan and two members of his team contracted COVID-19.

Having failed to deliver a Trump win on the recount, the audit’s organizers are moving the goalposts. Experts say their methodology is faulty.

The report claims that “mail-in ballots were cast under voter registration IDs for people that may not have received their ballots by mail, and no one with the same last name remained at that address.” The claim, according to the report, is that 23,344 ballots were “impacted under this condition.” But “comparing voter lists with commercial personator data is a very questionable methodology,” as Douglas Jones, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa, explained to The Dispatch. Jones notes that a change of address with the postal service does not mean a change of voting address. A person, for example, might take a months-long vacation and change an address with the post office, but never change a voting address, Jones explained. “In light of this, finding 23,344 discrepancies out of over 2 million voters is no shock,” Jones said. “That’s 1.1 percent.”

…

The report also makes an accusation about double voting, alleging that there were potentially more than 10,000 voters who voted in multiple counties. However, as Justin Grimmer, political science professor at Stanford and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, noted in an interview with The Dispatch, the accusation was “sloppily made.” The auditors looked only at the voter name and the birth year (not birth date), so, of course, it’s no surprise that there are multiple people with the same name and the same birth year. In response to this flawed conclusion, Maricopa County officials added on Twitter that “If Cyber Ninjas understood data analysis, they would have performed standard processes to rule out situations that lead to faulty conclusions.”

With partisan election reviews now springing up in states across the country, the Arizona GOP’s recount is shaping up to have a long, ugly legacy.

Benny White, a Republican elections expert in Tucson, referred to the report as a  “disinformation campaign,” saying that “we simply cannot tolerate, as a society, going through these kinds of circuses just because somebody didn’t like the result.”

“It demonstrates how debilitating it is to democracy,” said Center for Election Innovation & Research founder David Becker. “Despite the Cyber Ninjas’ failure to do anything that they said they could do or would do, these efforts are still spreading. There are legislators and elected leaders in other states looking at the absolute abject failure of what occurred in Arizona and they’re saying, ‘Let’s import that here.’”

More generally, Harri Hursti, ​​a computer programmer, hacker, election security expert, and the subject of the 2020 HBO documentary Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections, told The Dispatch the auditors seemingly characterized everything they don’t understand as being “potentially malicious.” 

Worth Your Time

• Late last week, Centers for Disease Control Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky overruled a CDC advisory panel and recommended COVID-19 booster shots to a much broader swath of the American population than just the elderly and immunocompromised. Dr. Megan Ranney of the Brown University School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Jeremy Samuel Faust believe it was a mistake. “Data from Israel, Britain and the United States show that the available COVID-19 vaccines continue to provide excellent protection against hospitalization and death for almost everyone,” they write. “Exceptions include the immune-compromised (who were already authorized to get a third dose) and people age 65 and older. There is inadequate evidence to support boosters for the general, younger population, including most people with underlying medical conditions. The C.D.C.’s list of conditions that make someone eligible for a booster is remarkably long, and few if any of these conditions have been shown to carry any additional risk of severe breakthrough illness. Boosters might help some people on the list, but the overall impact is likely to be small. Many thousands of young people would need to get additional shots to prevent a single hospitalization.”

• In an essay for The New Yorker, Chris Hayes argues that the internet has brought about an “Era of Mass Fame”—and it’s driving us all crazy. “Ever since there have been famous people, there have been people driven mad by fame,” he writes. “Being known by strangers, and, even more dangerously, seeking their approval, is an existential trap. And right now, the condition of contemporary life is to shepherd entire generations into this spiritual quicksand. … Everyone is losing their minds online because the combination of mass fame and mass surveillance increasingly channels our most basic impulses—toward loving and being loved, caring for and being cared for, getting the people we know to laugh at our jokes—into the project of impressing strangers, a project that cannot, by definition, sate our desires but feels close enough to real human connection that we cannot but pursue it in ever more compulsive ways.”

Presented Without Comment

Also Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• If you enjoyed Friday’s TMD on all things Congress, be sure to check out Sarah and Steve’s latest Dispatch Podcast with Manhattan Institute economist Brian Riedl. The trio discuss the debt ceiling—what it is and why legislators will likely find a way to raise it before the United States defaults—and the likelihood of another government shutdown. Plus: Is anyone in Washington concerned about our ballooning national debt?

• For a piece over the weekend, Charlotte spoke with several Afghan women pushing back against Taliban rule through the #DoNotTouchMyClothes social media campaign, donning traditional Afghan attire in protest of the Taliban’s niqab mandate. “The Taliban represents a jihadi, Islamist, Islamic fundamentalist, extremist, radical culture that is totally at odds with Afghan traditional culture,” Afghan-American historian Dr. Bahar Jalali told Charlotte. “One of the aims of the Taliban is to dilute so as to destroy Afghan identity and cultural heritage. By abandoning Afghanistan to this regime, I’m afraid that the international community has paved the way for the destruction of Afghan culture.”

• Jonah’s latest G-File riffs on the potpourri of misinformation surrounding the recent flareup at the southern border, arguing it’s indicative of a broader paranoid trend in American politics. “People get so addicted to a specific theoretical narrative about tyranny that they become blind to practical dangers,” he writes. “Today, the reigning paranoias of the left are about white supremacy, the patriarchy, and voter suppression. … Meanwhile, big swaths of the right are too busy obsessing over the supposed evils of vaccines—vaccines!—and critical race theory to notice they’re aiding and abetting this effort.”

• The FBI is set to release crime data later today showing the United States’ murder rate skyrocketed in 2020. In his Sunday French Press, David shares his thoughts about what to make of this number and how a just society should respond. “It turns out that increasing the certainty of punishment rather than the severity of punishment has a far greater deterrent effect,” he writes. “A coalition has to stand in the gap between ‘defund the police’ and ‘lock them up,’ between criminal rule and police impunity, and articulate a vision of justice that preserves public order, human dignity, and individual liberty.”

Let Us Know

What do you make of Ranney and Faust’s argument against the new federal booster shot recommendations?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@lawsonreports), Audrey Fahlberg (@AudreyFahlberg), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), Harvest Prude (@HarvestPrude), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).