Glossary

Domain and technical terms you meet when using bundeswahl. For the option reference see the README and the full cookbook in Usage.md.

The election

Bundeswahlleiterin. The Federal Returning Officer — the independent official who organises federal elections and certifies their results. Publishes the official results and reference data as open data.

Bundestagswahl (BTW). The election to the Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament. This CLI covers the 2025 election (Wahltag 23.02.2025). Wahlart BT marks Bundestag rows.

Amtliches Endergebnis. The official final result — the certified numbers (as opposed to preliminary election-night counts). The results data is this.

Areas

Gebiet / Gebietsart. An electoral area and its level. Three levels:

Each result row names its area (gebietsart, gebietsnummer, gebietsname) and, for a Wahlkreis, its parent Land (ueGebietsart/ueGebietsnummer).

Wahlkreis. A constituency — one of the 299 districts, each electing one member directly (Erststimme). wahlkreise lists them with their Land.

Land / Länder. A German federal state (16 in total).

Votes

Erststimme (Stimme 1). The first vote — for a candidate in your Wahlkreis; the candidate with the most first votes wins the constituency’s direct mandate, if the party’s Zweitstimmen cover the seat (see Gewählt).

Zweitstimme (Stimme 2). The second vote — for a party list; this vote decides each party’s overall share of seats. Usually the number people mean by “the result”.

In the data, stimme is 1 or 2. Of the System-Gruppe rows, Wahlberechtigte and Wählende have no ballot (null); Gültige, Ungültige and Übrige come once per ballot.

Groups & results

Gruppe / Gruppenart. A group in a result row and its kind:

kerg2. The Bundeswahlleiterin’s normalized results file (“Ergebnisse nach Wahlkreisen”), the source for results. It is long/tidy: one row per area × group × ballot, so each party has separate first- and second-vote rows, and each row carries the count (anzahl), share (prozent), and the comparison to the previous election (vorpAnzahl, diffProzentPkt, …). (The kerg.csv file holds the same data in a hard-to-parse wide layout; this CLI uses kerg2.)

Gewählt. The name of the party whose Wahlkreis candidate was elected (the direct mandate). It repeats on every row of a Wahlkreis (e.g. "GRÜNE"), and is empty for Bund/Land rows. It is – where the Erststimme winner got no seat because the party’s Zweitstimmen didn’t cover it (23 Wahlkreise in 2025), so it is not always the party with the most first votes. Candidate names are not in the data.

Strukturdaten. Structural data per Wahlkreis — ~50 demographic and economic indicators (area, population, age structure, employment, …), published so results can be read in context. structure returns each Wahlkreis as a column→value map; its Fußnoten column notes where a column holds a city- or Kreis-wide value.

Data & format

Datenlizenz Deutschland – Namensnennung 2.0 (dl-de/by-2.0). The open licence on the data: free to copy, adapt and reuse, including commercially, with attribution (“Quelle: Die Bundeswahlleiterin, Wiesbaden 2025”). See DATA_LICENSE.md.

CSV quirks. The files are semicolon-delimited, UTF-8 with a BOM, use German decimals (comma, e.g. 82,5122), and start with a multi-line human-readable preamble before the header row. bundeswahl handles all of this; in results, counts/percentages reach you as JSON numbers, null for empty/– cells. structure passes its values through as strings in German format ("128,0").

CLI / technical

Exit codes. 0 success · 2 usage error · 4 not found · 6 network failure · 1 other (incl. a non-CSV/HTML response). See Usage.md.

Filters are client-side. Each command downloads the whole dataset and filters in memory, so filters compose and an unmatched filter returns [] (not everything).

View the source on GitHub →