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German political leaders have reacted with alarm to U.S. President Donald Trump’s bombshell announcement that his administration will conduct peace negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the head of European leaders.
“To be clear, peace must last over the long term. It must secure Ukraine’s sovereignty,” said German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Thursday. “That is why we will never support a dictated peace. Nor will we accept any solution that leads to a decoupling of European and American security. Only one person would benefit from that. President Putin.”
Scholz, whose Social Democratic Party (SPD) is in third place according to polls ahead of a Feb. 23 national election, called for more spending on Germany’s defense and military aid for Ukraine, and urged conservatives to relax the country’s strict spending rules — a theme he has touched on repeatedly during the election campaign — in order to do so.
Can a voter verify their ballot was counted and for who the votes were cast?
Yes. You can observe the whole vote, keeping an eye on the ballot box all the time until it is emptied on a big table, where it is sorted, and once sorted things get counted, there’s a whole procedure to minimise confusion and with that errors, double counts etc. Unless a magician comes along and teleports your ballot out of the box you can then be sure that it has been counted.
What you can’t do is prove to anyone that you voted a certain way and that’s a good thing.
But can you prove to yourself that your vote for candidate a was cast for your name and no nefarious acts led it to go to candidate b instead?
Yes. I just described how.