Georg Thiel, the man charged with overseeing Germany's elections, was keen to underline the fact that Germany does not use voting machines, like in the US.

"We don't have a situation with voting machines that we may know from the US. The actual voting procedure at the polling station is old school,"

"We have no voting machines — at the end of the day, it's the ballot paper that gets counted,"

Thiel also went on to stress that any citizen has the right to walk in and watch the votes being counted.