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Help, the foreigners are voting!
The federal elections are about to come. We wanted to take this opportunity and challenge the system as a whole. We wanted to raise awareness about the fact that the German law excludes an estimated 9 million adults in Germany from political decision making. This is structural discrimination of more than 10% of the population.
We wanted to point to this injustice in a humorous way and launched the fake vote exchange platform VoteBuddy. Here we wanted to connect non-voters with people who are not entitled to vote to exchange votes for the elections.
We anticipated some controversy about the issue. And we got controversy. The outrage started with right-wing Facebook groups and went over to extreme right blogs and from the to identitarian movement, to Erika Steinbach and to Bernd Lucke. And suddenly all the Nazis were raging about VoteBuddy.
After he received countless reports, the election supervisor turned to the matter and initiated criminal investigations on vote rigging. Several press articles speculated about the true ownership of the online platform. Our made up startup from New York wasn’t convincing anybody, except the right wingers.
On Friday everybody could calm down again: VoteBuddy was a fake, there were no votes being exchanged. The nine million adults living in Germany will again not be able to participate in the elections. Of course we don’t think that a tool like VoteBuddy is the solution to the problem. Everybody should have their own vote and shouldn’t have to rely on others. Not voting (hello anarchist companions) should be the result of a free decision and not the result of status discrimination. But the election supervisor has no sense of humor and wants to continue with the criminal investigations.
VoteBuddy is a cooperation with the theater collective andcompany&co. They will now bring the idea of vote exchange to the stage. With the title “Don’t vote yourself! Become a vote buddy!” they will conduct an experiment in indirect democracy on September 19th in Dresden, Dreikönigskirche, called Wahlokratie: fin de partie.
