Who can vote in the Berlin election on 20 September 2026?

German citizens who are 16 on election day, so born before 21 September 2010, who have had their main home in Berlin since at least 20 June 2026 and have not lost the right to vote by court order. They vote for the Abgeordnetenhaus and for their district assembly, the BVV. Citizens of another EU member state who meet the same age and residence conditions vote for the BVV only. Anyone with a passport from outside the EU cannot vote in either election.

Can EU citizens vote in the Berlin election?

Yes, for the Bezirksverordnetenversammlung of their district, with one vote for a list. They are entered in the register automatically if they were registered with their main home in Berlin by 20 June 2026 and are 16 or older on election day, and their notice should have arrived by 30 August. They cannot vote for the Abgeordnetenhaus. Berlin counts about 250,000 eligible EU citizens, which is the difference between roughly 2.5 million voters for the state parliament and 2.75 million for the district assemblies.

How many votes do I have and what does the ballot paper look like?

German citizens receive two sheets. The Abgeordnetenhaus paper carries both votes on one sheet for the first time: a first vote for a person standing in one of the 78 constituencies on the left, and a second vote for a district-wide or Berlin-wide party list on the right. The two do not have to match. The BVV paper is a separate sheet with one vote for a list. Every ballot has its top right corner cut off, and the BVV sheet also has two punched holes so blind voters can tell them apart.

Is there a referendum (Volksentscheid) on 20 September 2026?

No. The two citizens' initiatives that were heading for the same day, Berlin autofrei and Berlin Werbefrei, both fell short of the signatures they needed by 8 May 2026, and the Landeswahlleiter declared both failed on 22 May. Only the Abgeordnetenhaus and the twelve BVVs are elected on Sunday.

What are the postal vote deadlines for the Berlin election 2026?

The online application closed on Tuesday 15 September. A written application, using the form on the back of the notice, an email or a fax to the Bezirkswahlamt, is possible until Friday 18 September at 15:00. Until the same time you can walk into your district's Briefwahlstelle with photo ID, get the papers and vote on the spot. A replacement Wahlschein for lost or missing papers is issued only until Saturday 19 September at 12:00. The red Wahlbrief must physically reach the Bezirkswahlamt by Sunday 20 September at 18:00; the office asks you to allow three working days by post, and you can hand it in yourself.

What if my postal voting papers have not arrived?

Contact your Bezirkswahlamt immediately. If you can credibly declare that the papers never reached you or were lost, the office can issue a replacement Wahlschein until Saturday 19 September 2026 at 12:00. Once you have applied for a postal vote you cannot simply vote at the polling station on Sunday without that Wahlschein. About 1,400 postal voters in Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf constituencies 3 and 4 were sent the ballot for the wrong constituency in documents issued on 24 and 25 August; the district office is contacting them and issuing new papers.

What do I need to bring to the polling station on Sunday?

Photo ID: a Personalausweis, a passport or a driving licence, and it may exceptionally be expired. The Wahlbenachrichtigung is useful but not required; if you lost it, the Wahllokalsuche on the Landeswahlleiter's site shows your polling station from your address. Polling stations are open from 8:00 to 18:00, there are about 2,550 of them, and nobody can vote on your behalf. If you fall ill on the day, someone with a signed authority can collect postal papers for you from the Bezirkswahlamt until 15:00.

Why does the BVV election matter?

Each of the twelve district assemblies has 55 members, needs 3 percent for a list to get in, and elects the Bezirksbuergermeister and five Bezirksstadtraete who run the district office. Parking zones, dog runs, bulky waste collection, library opening hours, playgrounds, pedestrian crossings, Kita places, cycle lanes and the Ordnungsamt are decided at this level. For EU citizens it is the only Berlin vote they hold, and for everyone else it is the vote that changes the street they live on.

Berlin Election 2026: Which Ballot Your Passport Gets You

Yusuf Ucuz

Sep 15

8 min read

Five years ago, on the last Sunday of September 2021, the queue outside Wahllokal 509 at Lehniner Platz in Wilmersdorf stopped moving for the better part of an hour. Ballot papers ran out across the city, the Marathon had cut the delivery vans off, and people were still voting after the first projection was on television. Berlin's constitutional court threw the whole election out a year later and the city voted again in February 2023.

That memory is why this Sunday, 20 September 2026, gets more attention in this city than a state election usually earns. It is also why a lot of people who live here are asking the same two questions in the kitchen this week: can I actually vote, and what do I get to vote on?

The answer depends on your passport, your birthday and the date on your Anmeldung, and it changes the deadlines that still apply to you. If you are reading this on Tuesday, one of those deadlines is today.

A long queue of voters standing in the sun outside Wahllokal 509 at Lehniner Platz in Berlin-Wilmersdorf on 26 September 2021, in front of a modern glass and steel building

Lehniner Platz in Wilmersdorf on 26 September 2021, the election Berlin had to repeat. This time the city has about 2,550 polling stations and 40,000 helpers, and the postal vote is the way to skip the queue entirely.

What is actually on the table on 20 September

Two things, and only two. Berlin elects its 20th Abgeordnetenhaus, the state parliament, and the twelve districts each elect a new Bezirksverordnetenversammlung, the BVV. Nothing else is on the ballot this time.

That last part matters, because for most of the spring it looked like there would be more. Two citizens' initiatives, one to make the streets inside the S-Bahn ring largely car free and one to ban digital advertising screens, were collecting signatures for referendums on the same day. Both fell short of the number they needed by the 8 May deadline, and the Landeswahlleiter declared both failed on 22 May. So there is no Volksentscheid on Sunday, whatever you remember signing in the spring.

What has changed is the paper itself:

The Abgeordnetenhaus now uses one ballot paper for both votes, the way a Bundestag election does. In 2023 you were handed two separate sheets.
Your first vote goes to a person standing in your constituency. There are 78 of them across the city and the candidate with the most votes takes the seat.
Your second vote goes to a party list, and it decides how the remaining seats, at least 52, are shared out. A party needs 5 percent of second votes to get in.
The BVV ballot is a separate sheet with one vote, for a list in your district. The threshold there is 3 percent.

Every ballot paper has its top right corner cut off so that a template for blind voters lines up. The BVV paper additionally has two punched holes, so you can tell the two sheets apart by touch.

The plenary chamber of the Abgeordnetenhaus von Berlin, a semicircle of pale wooden desks and dark chairs under a glass roof, with the German and European flags behind the president's bench

The chamber on Niederkirchnerstrasse that Sunday fills. The house has at least 130 seats: 78 won directly in constituencies, the rest through the party lists your second vote ranks.

Who gets which ballot in the Berlin election 2026

This is the part people get wrong in both directions. Some assume that living here is enough. Others assume that a foreign passport rules them out entirely. Neither is true.

The Landeswahlleiter's own question catalogue sets three conditions, and they are the same for both elections:

You are 16 or older on election day, which means born before 21 September 2010. This is the first Abgeordnetenhaus election open to 16 and 17 year olds, and there are about 55,000 of them.
You have had your main home in Berlin since 20 June 2026 at the latest, so three months without a break. Move to Berlin in July and you wait for the next one.
A court has not taken your right to vote away.

Then the passport decides how many sheets you are handed:

German citizens get both: the Abgeordnetenhaus paper with two votes and the BVV paper with one.
Citizens of another EU country get the BVV paper only. You are entered in the register automatically if you meet the age and residence conditions, and your notice should have arrived by 30 August. Berlin counts about 250,000 of you.
Everyone else, including people who have paid taxes here for a decade on a British, Turkish, American or Indian passport, gets nothing on Sunday. Only naturalisation changes that.

Put together, about 2.5 million people can vote for the Abgeordnetenhaus and about 2.75 million for the district assemblies. The gap between those two numbers is the EU electorate.

Two edge cases come up every time. If you moved within Berlin after 9 August, you stay on the register of your old address and vote at the polling station printed on your notice. If you leave Berlin before Sunday, you are struck off, and a postal ballot you already hold is the only way you can still take part.

A Berlin polling notice for the February 2023 repeat election lying on a table, with the Bezirkswahlamt address, the polling hours and a blue campaign leaflet reading Berlin, waehl dich neu

The Wahlbenachrichtigung from the 2023 repeat election. Yours for this Sunday should have come between 10 and 30 August. If it did not, you can still vote with photo ID, and the polling station search on the Landeswahlleiter's site tells you where.

Work out your own ballot and your last open deadline

The ballot board above takes your passport, your birthday and your registration date and draws the sheets you will actually be handed. Then it asks where you will be on Sunday and marks, against the clock, which of this week's deadlines still applies to you. The dates are the Landeswahlleiter's, checked on 15 September 2026.

The postal vote clock, day by day

The postal vote is where most of the week's deadlines live, and they are not all the same deadline. Here is the sequence, from the official Briefwahl page:

Tuesday 15 September is the last day for the online application. You need the number from your notice or your date of birth and address.
Until Friday 18 September, 15:00, you can still apply in writing: the form on the back of your notice, an email or a fax to your Bezirkswahlamt. After that, nothing.
Also until Friday 15:00, the district Briefwahlstelle takes walk-ins. You show photo ID, get the papers on the spot, fill them in behind a screen and drop them in the box. That is the safest route this late, because the post office is no longer part of it.
Saturday 19 September, 12:00 is the last moment for a replacement Wahlschein if yours never arrived or you lost it. Once you have applied for a postal vote, you cannot simply turn up at the polling station on Sunday without that Wahlschein.
Sunday 20 September, 18:00 is when the red envelope has to be physically at your Bezirkswahlamt. Not postmarked. There. The office asks you to allow three working days for the post, which means the postbox stopped being a safe option on Wednesday.

There is one more reason to check your envelope carefully this year. On 9 September the Landeswahlleiter confirmed that Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf had sent about 1,400 postal voters in constituencies 3 and 4 the ballot paper for the wrong constituency, in documents issued on 24 and 25 August. The district office is writing to everyone affected and issuing fresh papers, and the earlier vote is cancelled. If you live there and applied in the first week, look at the constituency number on your paper before you seal anything.

A red Berlin postal ballot envelope, the Wahlbrief, photographed front and back on a white background, addressed to the Bezirkswahlamt

The red Wahlbrief. Inside it goes the white envelope with your ballot papers and the Wahlschein. It has to reach the district office by 18:00 on Sunday, and you can hand it in there yourself.

Sunday itself, in five lines

Polling stations are open 8:00 to 18:00. There are about 2,550 of them this time, more than in 2021, run by around 40,000 volunteers.
Bring photo ID. Personalausweis, passport or a driving licence all work, and the ID may even be expired. The notice itself is helpful, not required.
Lost the notice? Type your address into the Wahllokalsuche and go.
Nobody can vote on your behalf, not a partner, not a parent. The one exception is sudden illness on the day: until 15:00 on Sunday someone with a signed authority can collect postal papers for you from the Bezirkswahlamt.
At 18:00 the first projection lands, and the Landeswahlleiter has promised the preliminary result overnight, with the press conference on Monday afternoon.

A dark blue Infratest dimap exit-poll ballot box marked 18 Uhr Prognose on a table inside a Berlin school used as a polling station

The 18:00 projection starts with boxes like this one, photographed at the Rheingau-Gymnasium in Friedenau during the 2023 repeat election. The real count follows into the night.

Why the BVV ballot is not the consolation prize

If you hold an EU passport, it is tempting to read your single sheet as the small print of democracy. I would read it the other way round.

The BVV has 55 members per district and it elects the Bezirksbürgermeister and five Bezirksstadträte, the people who run the district office. Almost everything I have written about in this series lands on their desks: where the parking zones start and stop, which park gets a fenced dog run, how fast the Sperrmüll appointment comes, whether your library opens on Sunday, and how many people the Bürgeramt has on a Tuesday. Playgrounds, pedestrian crossings, Kita places, cycle lanes and the Ordnungsamt are district decisions too.

The Abgeordnetenhaus sets the rent law and the transport budget. The BVV decides what your street looks like by Christmas. For someone who has lived in the same Kiez for eight years, that is not the smaller vote.

The brick town hall of Neukoelln on Karl-Marx-Strasse, its tall clock tower against a blue sky, with the U-Bahn entrance and shops along the street

Rathaus Neukölln on Karl-Marx-Strasse, one of twelve district town halls that get a new assembly on Sunday. The BVV that meets here decides the things you notice on the way to the U-Bahn.

My advice

If you are German and still have no postal papers, stop waiting for the post. Go to your district's Briefwahlstelle before Friday 15:00, vote there, and the week is done. A Thursday postbox is how red envelopes arrive on the Monday, when they count for nothing.

If you hold an EU passport, go on Sunday. Your one vote decides the things you actually complain about on this street, and a quarter of a million people in this city have exactly the same ticket as you.

If you hold neither, Sunday is still worth watching. The last election changed the government, and this one sets the rent, transport and Kita policy you live under for the next five years. The posters come down within a week. The decisions do not.

A ballot paper for the first vote in the 2023 Berlin repeat election lying on a wooden table, listing constituency candidates with their parties and empty circles beside each name

A 2023 first-vote ballot for the constituency around Friedenau. This Sunday both votes sit on one sheet: the person on the left, the party list on the right, and they do not have to match.

Image credits

Source and licence details for the 7 photographs used in this article.

The Abgeordnetenhaus von Berlin on Niederkirchnerstrasse in Berlin-Mitte: Gunnar Klack, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The queue outside Wahllokal 509 at Lehniner Platz in Berlin-Wilmersdorf on 26 September 2021: Fridolin freudenfett, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The plenary chamber of the Abgeordnetenhaus von Berlin: Sandro Halank, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

A Wahlbenachrichtigung for the Berlin repeat election of 12 February 2023: IgorCalzone1, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Infratest dimap exit-poll box at the Rheingau-Gymnasium in Berlin-Friedenau, 12 February 2023: IgorCalzone1, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Rathaus Neukölln on Karl-Marx-Strasse in Berlin-Neukölln: A.Savin, Wikipedia, Free Art License 1.3, via Wikimedia Commons.

A first-vote ballot paper for the Berlin repeat election of 12 February 2023, Rheingau-Gymnasium Friedenau: IgorCalzone1, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.