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Then just buy your kid a 1mm wetsuit.

You may not even have to buy one yourself: Some schools have started to buy and lend "Burkinis" to students on their own cost, in an attempt to appease the zealots: https://www.waz.de/staedte/her...

And yet, the highest German court had to rule on a case where parents did not want her daughter to participate in the swimming lessons: https://www.bundesverfassungsg...

Ann election must be free, equal, and secure. To ensure equality, the count must be repeatable for everyone. Online voting vor any voting machine does not provide that feature.

citation needed. also you could tell us about the last time you repeated a count for paper votes. there are indeed methods to perform verifiable counting electronically, you just don't know about them. the tricky part here is "for everyone" as in "without any specialist knowledge on the subject" (quoting the very same ruling you wrongly cited, see below). fair enough. however, you actually *do* need some specific knowledge to repeat and validate a count on paper, at least you need to be able to read and count. there's people around who can't even do that. as society progresses it should not be unreasonable for some degree of computer literacy to be considered normal.

The German supreme court ruled that voting machines do not allow real democratic elections.

the german *constitutional* court ruled that the *specific implementation of voting machines* used in the 2005 bundestag election didn't meet the requirements.
http://www.bundesverfassungsge...

And it is not a good argument that voting machines or online voting is faster. Fast and convenient is not the core concerns for democracy. The above criteria are.

this i totally agree with. note also that i'm not an online voting advocate at all. it's just critics mostly tend to use weak (if not plain wrong) arguments.

Short answer: You've just witnessed how your country went from a democracy to fascism in just a few years, murdered millions of its own citizens and killed many more millions across the continent. Now you've been given the task of writing a new constitution. What do you do?

Given the then very recent atrocities, the first thing you write down is that Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority. With that out of the way, you analyze what went wrong with the old constitution, and decide the new constitution must be resistant against attempts to abolish it or alter its basic principles. Part of that is that some articles can't have their essential meaning changed, others can't be changed at all. But it goes further -- organizations that have the goal to abolish the constitution can be banned (along with symbols that represent them), and if the Federal Constitutional Court agrees, even parties (so far a successor party of the NSDAP and a communist party in the 50s.) Also, no speech that is capable of inciting violence against minorities.

Those are the limits. I realize some of the consequences sound ridiculous to Americans, but you have to see it in the historical context. Also, some impressions Americans often have about those limitations are simply not true. For example, showing swastikas. I've seen plenty of swastikas in history class or in movies. That's perfectly legal (education/art). A T-shirt with the NSDAP flag, on the other hand, can indeed get you a fine of several hundred euros.

In practice, Freedom of Expression is alive and well in Germany (unless you're a Nazi.) There are no beeps during TV shows and wardrobe malfunctions are something to laugh about. You're much less likely to get sued, and civil and criminal sentences are much lower (incarceration rate is a bit over a tenth of the US'.) Nobody raises an eyebrow when you proclaim that you're an Atheist and several openly gay politicians have been elected into high offices (two equivalent to a governor and our new Foreign Minister/Vice Chancellor, for example.)

When you read that the president can't veto a law, keep in mind that he's merely the Head of State. The US President is also the Head of Government, and elected directly (in practice.) Sufficient to say that last time those positions were held by the same person, it didn't work out that well for us. The parliament elects the chancellor, and the parliament can also elect a new one at any time. The ability to get rid of a Head of Government, without an "impeachable offense", can be useful at times. The parliament has proportional representation (with the limitation that only parties that get >5% of the votes are taken into account), so it almost never happens that a single party can form the government on its own, and those coalitions can break apart to form a new government with other parties. Finally, the courts usually do a very good job, some attempts to introduce particularly stupid laws you may have heard about backfire and we get a new Fundamental Right out of it.

One more thing that may be important: Election campaigns, particularly financing, work differently. Parties and their candidates get most of their financing out of tax money, depending on how many votes they had in the last elections, and membership fees. There's a limited number of campaign spot slots available that get assigned the same way, you can't just buy more. Also, no PACs.

Yes, and isn't it ironic that the European Constitution, rejected by so many of the Europeans, was about to change that? (Linky)

No, it wasn't. At least not according to the German Constitutional Court (text in English).

I don't know if this is really on topic (or even of interest) but the (German) Federal Constitutional Court judged that the usage of electronic voting machines in Hesse was illegal

the main point was the intransparency of the counting process - so at least in Germany the usage of electronic voting machines is very unlikely.

the decision (unfortunately only in German, no idea if a Google translation makes sense...): http://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/entscheidungen/cs20090303_2bvc000307.html

http://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/entscheidungen/rs20080227_1bvr037007.html This is the text of the ruling, so from the horse's mouth. My german admittedly is not perfect, but a native speaker told me there is nothing there that actually requires approval from a judge, just an initial suspicion of a crime being committed. Reading through, I can't find any such requirement myself, either. It emphasizes the importance of the relevant basic rights, and states there must be sufficient measures taken to ensure the right to privacy is maintained. But nothing about getting approval from a court as far as I can tell.

The original article points out that keeping logs is incompatible with existing German law. But the law will soon be changed, because Germany will have to comply with an EU directive mandating that logs be kept for at least 6 months.

It wouldn't be the first time that the highest German court nullifies the implementation of a EU directive.