Did Postal Ballot Results Prop Up Germany’s Anti-AfD Firewall?

In Germany, the results of a recent election in the state of Saxony-Anhalt ought to look very familiar to voters here in the United States. In this election, the populist Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, or AfD) was looking at a very possible outright majority in the state's Parliament, but late-arriving mail-in ballots prevented that. AfD still won a convincing victory, but it's the mail-in ballots that should raise some eyebrows; they broke much higher for the other contending parties than in the general election.

This is raising some questions in Europe, and it ought to be raising some here in the USA, as well.

How did Germany's anti-AfD 'firewall' hold, despite 51% of in-person voters backing the party? It's because of the vast number of mail-in ballots, says John Rosenthal, despite the known security issues with postal voting.

What the German mainstream calls the ‘firewall’ has held. Despite winning an impressive 43.8% of the vote in regional elections in Saxony-Anhalt, the opposition AfD, or Alternative for Germany party, has fallen three seats short of the absolute majority in the regional parliament that would have ensured that the party could form a government under prime minister candidate Ulrich Siegmund.

But critical German observers are pointing to a massive anomaly in the voting data that raises the obvious question: how exactly did the ‘firewall’ hold?

Here is a graph published by the X-account Datenfuzzi comparing the results of in-person voting to the results of voting by mail-in ballot.

Here's that graph:

Zwischenergebnis #SachsenAnhalt #LTWSachsenAnhalt2026 #Urnenwahl #Briefwahl #Zweitstimmen 01:31 Uhr pic.twitter.com/P8AXvgWQOo

— Datenfuzzi ™ (@datenfuzzi_de) September 7, 2026

That is to say the least, suspicious. Mail-in ballots came in for the Christian Democrats and the other parties at a much higher rate than in-person votes. Mail-in voting is known and acknowledged to be less secure than in-person voting; we have seen enough shenanigans right here in the United States to have learned that lesson, and if persons unknown in Saxony-Anhalt wanted to twiddle with an election to keep AfD from an outright majority, well, this is what that might look like.

The AfD’s share of the mail-in vote is 27 percentage points less than its share of the in-person vote, whereas all the other parties had a larger share of the mail-in vote compared to the in-person vote: the Christian Democrats of Chancellor Friedrich Merz +9.7 percentage points, Merz’s Social Democratic coalition partners +5.9 percentage points, and so on.

Numerous German-speaking commentators are wondering: how is this possible? Is it a reflection of some party or demographic preference for in-person voting? Or is it rather a reflection of the greater susceptibility to manipulation of mail-in ballots?

There's little or nothing in the way of evidence, but while either of these alternatives (hah) is possible, we do know that every party in Germany's rather complex political landscape that isn't AfD were pulling out all the stops to keep AfD from winning a majority, even in one Bundesland. The AfD is described as a "far-right" party in Europe, which probably places much of its policy firmly in Mitt Romney territory, but the one area they are adamant about is getting immigration, legal and illegal, in check, and keeping Germany German. That doesn't seem too unreasonable, but the other parties are sure not having any of that.

Could they be colluding to deny AfD electoral victories? Again, there's little evidence, just numbers that don't seem to add up.

This should prompt another look at our own voting systems. Too many states have already gone down the "vote by mail" route, including Colorado, where we lived for 30 years. It's a bad system, easily manipulated, and should be precluded; if the SAVE America Act were passed, it would be. Now Germany has given us another reason to get that done.

Need another reason to vote this November? I've lost count, but here's another one.

Editor’s Note: Republicans are fighting for election integrity by requiring proper identification to vote. It's common sense, yet Democrats are spreading lies about the impact of such a measure. 

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