for invalidity concerning the postal vote: Both votes are invalidated if the envelope for the postal vote is empty, if it contains several differently marked ballot papers or if it actually should have been rejected (including also those ballot paper envelopes which differ from the rest in a way that endangers the election secrecy.) In contrast, the votes of voters who die or lose their right to vote before the ballot vote takes place explicitly remain valid. Invalid votes, equally to non posted votes, have no effect on the result of the poll. Nevertheless, their number is officially counted and published. According to § 4 of the election statistics act, the cause of invalidity is also a census criterion to be mentioned in the official election statistics. The numbers for a total of twelve categories of (partly) invalid ballot papers have been published at last (for the Federal Parliament elections in 2005). However, it only concerns combinations of the three basic categories “empty or crossed out”, “multiple crosses” and “other causes”, divided into first and second votes. Thus one can hardly deduce the reason for the invalidity; whether it was a matter of purpose, mistake or just ignorance of the voting right. For combinations of invalid and valid votes on a ballot paper, the belonging elected (major) parties have been deciphered as well. Invalid votes count as non votes in the financing of the parties. The parties do not receive any money for them. As the party's financing is capped and the total sum is regularly being utilised, the discrepancy of valid votes for parties who take part in financing is practically low. A small number of invalid votes is generally beneficial for parties with above average fund raising (membership fees included) seeing that more money remains in the bonus fund. Electoral threshold Seats in the German Bundestag distributed by regional lists are only given to parties passing a five percent electoral threshold of the federally valid second votes. Alternatively, if a party wins at least three constituencies, a party still gains seats by proportional representation according to the number of second votes they received. Those second votes for parties that meet neither requirement will not be taken into account for the distribution of seats among the rest of the parties. Parties who qualify for proportional representation in this manner are recognized as party groups, as a party must win