If you go back two or three decades....in general, you had to show up on German election days (always a Sunday) to vote. In the past decade, absentee ballots are becoming fairly popular. You basically get the notice to vote in the mail, telling you the date and location of your registration. Then it'll say.....if you are out of town, or out of country.....you can vote by absentee....by sending this attached letter to your local Rothaus (town-hall). They send you a ballot about two to three weeks prior to the election, and you vote. Reason for the absentee? It can be literally any reason. You could even say that you hate public events, and that's good enough for the absentee ballot.
What people have noticed in this last Bavarian election.....almost fifty percent of people went this way. This is an amazingly high number.
So some journalists are hyped up and suggesting that it's not all positive. But they can't really give you any logical reason to be negative about this trend.
The older Germans would talk about voting in the 1950s/1960s.....how people would show up in tie and suit, and have coffee and cake after the vote at their local cafe. It was a big deal.
Is the absentee method increasing the numbers of voters? NO. That's one curious part of the story....you can show a trend from the 1990s (as the wall went down) to now, and it's a continual less number voting.
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