Seriously, Ebbie, I nearly had not opened this thread since I was convinced it was a follow up to the infamous 'Have you done it' thread.
The voting procedure itself in Germany is very similar as the one described by Bardford for Canada. I also know the counting procedure from own experience. It is easy since there are exact rules when and how a vote has to be counted. We (members from all parties) count the votes twice (or more often until there is agreement) in our local polling station directly after the election. It takes about two hours and the final result is know when the last local polling station has phoned in the results (about four hours after the election). Of course, there is always an official recount (the phone message could be wrong, e.g.) which takes about 4 weeks. But I cannot remember that any result has been turned by this recount.

Since the rules are extremely clear (stating e.g, that no vote by mail will be accepted after closing time of the polling stations), there are usually perhaps only one or two votes among our local 400 that remain undecided at the evening of the election and have to be decided about later by others.

I completely trust the counting procedure. Of course, there is a margin of error in our precedure as well, but my impression is that it is considerably smaller than in the USA. So my feeling is that a difference in votes of about 400 in the whole of Germany is trustworthy, but I wouldn't bet on a nationwide difference of let's say 12 votes.

The legal problems we had with elections are rarely if ever with counting (only locally when there is a 2 or three votes difference), but with undue influence. In our town an election had to be repeated because there were rumours in the days before the election that one of the candidates was an alcoholic.

Wolfgang