- In the Bernese community of Bremgarten, the yes and no votes on the pension initiative were mistakenly swapped on Sunday.
- Bremgarten was supposedly the only municipality in Switzerland to have accepted the popular initiative “For secure and sustainable retirement provision”.
- It is a human error.
“We are a red-green community,” emphasized Andreas Schwab, President of the local council, when asked by the Keystone-SDA news agency. In this respect, it could not have been that Bremgarten had agreed to the Young Liberals’ initiative. The mix-up was reported to the federal government on Sunday for correction.
The online portal Bluewin.ch first reported on the mix-up of votes. As can be seen from the still provisional results on the Canton of Bern website, Bremgarten had approved the pension initiative with a supposed yes vote of 70.1 percent.
In an earlier version, the graphic had an error: All municipalities rejected the pension initiative – including Bremgarten near Bern. The Federal Statistical Office (BFS) corrected the data set.
In reality, Bremgarten had also rejected the initiative – with 1,563 no votes to 668 yes votes. The result from Bremgarten on the popular initiative for a 13th AHV pension was correct. This was approved with a yes vote of 55.5 percent.
Mistakes in Olten too
During the counting of Sunday’s vote, a ballot box was forgotten in Olten/SO. The results were corrected after a recount. However, the outcome of the two federal proposals and the cantonal initiative remains unchanged, as the Solothurn State Chancellery announced.
The outcome of the municipal vote also remains unchanged, as the city of Olten informed. The last ballot box by the mailbox in the town hall was accidentally not included in the evaluation on Sunday. This contained around 600 election envelopes.