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WSJ - Think the U.S. Presidential Race Is Coming Unglued? Here’s One That Really Is

VIENNA—Austria’s politics are coming unstuck. Or more precisely, unglued.

Special envelopes designed to hold mail-in ballots for the Oct. 2 runoff presidential election are rimmed with a glue that should seal them tight. But it is mysteriously malfunctioning, and that has provoked a crisis, which in the words of one TV anchor is leading to a “Bundespräsidentenwiederholungswahlverschiebung”—the postponement of the rerun of the presidential election.

Investigators, including forensics experts from this country’s version of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, have been struggling to pinpoint the problem. They have baked the envelopes at 158 degrees Fahrenheit to see if excessive heat is behind the problem. It isn’t.

The glue’s menace to democracy, however, is clear enough. Some ballot envelopes open on their own after being signed and sealed, nullifying the votes inside.

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Newspapers have dubbed it Gluegate, the Glue Glitch and the Glue Crisis. For embarrassed Austrians, the one consolation is that the glue came from Germany.

On Monday, Austria’s top elections official, Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka, said the vote needed to be delayed by two months to allow for new ballots to be printed and distributed. He acknowledged he had no way to know “how many and which ballot envelopes could still come open.”

On Thursday, the Constitution Committee of the lower house of parliament will take up legislation authorizing the delay and the use of more basic envelopes in which the glue, they hope, will work.

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For years, the envelope quietly did its job. Then came the hot election year of 2016, in which the refugee crisis shook Austrian politics. An anti-immigrant presidential candidate, Norbert Hofer, stunned the establishment by winning the first round in April in a landslide. He lost the runoff in May by just over 30,000 votes to center-left challenger Alexander Van der Bellen, narrowly missing his chance, it seemed, at becoming the first right-wing populist head of state in postwar Western Europe.

But the Constitutional Court in July nullified the May election, upholding a challenge from Mr. Hofer’s Freedom Party alleging improprieties in how mail-in ballots were counted. A rerun of the runoff was scheduled for Oct. 2.

Here's an example of how it affects people who want to vote via mail-in ballot:

Beate Rhomberg, a 32-year-old photographer and journalist in western Austria, planned to be on vacation, and requested a mail-in ballot. Two weeks ago she filled it out, signed it to certify she had voted, peeled off the tape covering the adhesive flap, sealed it shut and left it on her desk at home. The next day, she noticed something strange.

The flap and an envelope edge had come undone.

“The envelope simply came apart from one day to the next,” Ms. Rhomberg recalled.

She emailed the Interior Ministry over the weekend and got a call back just after 7 a.m. on Monday of last week. An official said because the envelope had come unstuck after she had already signed it, she had lost her vote—and that the only recourse, if the problem was widespread, would be to challenge the results after the election.

They also involved forensic experts as it says here:

Interior Ministry officials sought help from their own forensic experts, asking Austria’s Criminal Intelligence Service, or BKA, to get involved.

“We have a problem here in the adhesive area,” Andrea Raninger, head of forensics at the BKA, Austria’s top crime investigations agency, said in an interview. “There are a great many envelopes to be examined.”

She said the investigation quickly ruled out the theory that high heat during transportation could have caused the glue to become undone.

Her department’s experts in chemical analysis, often involved in drug cases, are assisting specialists in document forensics. She said they have found no evidence of foul play. The investigation, she warned, could take weeks.

In the political arena, patience with election officials—and the ins and outs of adhesives, envelopes and flaps—is wearing thin.

“The whole world has managed to deal with glue. For centuries,” said Andreas Schieder, the parliamentary leader of the governing, center-left Social Democrats. “It’s supposed to work. That is why we have an administration, and it simply has to get all of this in order. Period.”

So I read about this on another site yesterday and went on GAF just now, looked like nobody had made a thread for this piece of news yet.

Everyone's getting tired of this presidential election. A lot of people have theories that politicians might have meddled but I don't know why they would, the presidential election isn't as important as getting the majority in the parliament from what I know.

Seal this thread if old.