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In Germany, the second vote (German language: Zweitstimme) is generally the decisive vote for the allocation of seats to the political parties. With it, the Voting chooses a party whose candidates are put together on a state list. In addition to the second vote, the voter can cast a first vote (German language: Erststimme), with which he or she votes for a candidate in the constituency. The validity of the second vote remains unaffected by any invalidity of the first vote ( Section 39 of the Federal Election Law).
In some German state electoral systems, the vote corresponding to the second vote is called the list vote (Saxony) or the state vote (Thuringia, Rhineland-Palatinate, Hesse). It has been proposed that the second vote in the federal election be renamed the list vote.
The share of seats in the Bundestag held by a party therefore corresponds roughly to its share of the votes it received. Distortions arise from the threshold clause. According to Section 6 Paragraph 1 Sentence 2 of the , the second votes of those voters who voted with their first vote for a successful candidate who was either not nominated by a party that also ran on a state list or (this has only been the case since 2011) was nominated by a party that failed to meet the threshold clause are not taken into account for the allocation of seats. This regulation is intended to prevent these voters from exerting a de facto double influence on the composition of the German Bundestag.
The allocation of first votes by second-vote voters of the smaller parties can be influenced by the person of the direct candidate, but also by secondary party sympathies. In the case of the FDP, it is significant that during the social-liberal coalition, 29.9% of its second-vote voters supported the SPD direct candidate with their first vote in 1976 and 35.5% in 1980, while in the first election after the coalition change in 1983, 58.3% supported the CDU/CSU candidate, and the figure showed great fluctuations in subsequent elections. In the 2013 federal election, it was 63.1%. The Greens' second-vote voters gave their first vote in this election to the SPD by 34.4%, and to the Left by 15.7%.Informationen des Bundeswahlleiters: , Heft 4 der Wahlstatistik, S. 24.
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