Chapter 4 of 7

Who gets elected?

How votes turn into seats: thresholds, direct mandates, and why the House has more than 130 members.

Who gets elected to the BVV?

The number of votes decides how many seats a party or voter group receives in the BVV. To win any seat at all, a list needs at least 3 % of the valid votes cast in the Bezirk. BVV elections also give newcomers, smaller parties and local voter groups a realistic chance of being elected.

Every vote counts

Every vote helps decide which parties sit in the BVV and the House, and how strongly. Even if the party you vote for wins no seat, the vote still matters: parties that reach 1 % in the House election receive public funding from the State of Berlin for their work and campaigns.

Who gets elected to the House of Representatives?

The candidate with the most first votes in a constituency wins that seat directly: a direct mandate. The total number of seats a party receives, however, is set by its share of the second votes; the direct mandates it has won are counted towards that total.

Only parties that win at least 5 % of all second votes across Berlin, or at least one direct mandate, take part in the proportional allocation of seats.

Who sits in a BVV, and how many members does it have?

Each of Berlin’s twelve BVVs has 55 elected district representatives. A list’s share of the vote in the Bezirk decides how many of them it gets; the seats are filled in the order of candidates on the list.

Who sits in the House, and how many members are there?

The House has at least 130 members. 78 are elected directly in the constituencies, by the most first votes. The remaining members, at least 52, come from the party lists according to the second votes. Because some parties receive overhang seats and others compensatory seats, the size changes after every election: at present there are 159 members.

A note on the years: the elections of September 2021 were declared invalid by Berlin’s constitutional court because of numerous problems on polling day and were repeated in full in February 2023. The 2023 figures are from that repeat.