The information was relayed on Twitter an hour and a half before polls closed in the states of Saarland, Saxony and Thuringia on Sunday. It was reportedly similar to the official exit poll results broadcast on public broadcasters ARD and ZDF at 6 pm German time.

“This is damaging democracy,” Wolfgang Bosbach, of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU), told the Cologne daily Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger. “There is the danger that election results could be falsified. Therefore, these exit polls must be strictly monitored.”

Joerg van Essen of the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) described the Tweets as "unacceptable."

A criminal offense

Joerg Schoenenborn, editor-in-chief for public broadcaster WDR, the station responsible for providing election results to other public broadcasters, insisted that the station did not leak the numbers.

“The claim that the data from our election researchers was posted to the Web first is wrong,” he said. “I looked into the numbers and found no similarities with our internal data, which we had in the afternoon.”

Releasing election results before polling stations close is a criminal offense in Germany, punishable by fines of up to 50,000 euros. Officials may reportedly move to ban exit polls in order to keep election results out of the social media.

The results could face a legal challenge and be declared null and void, according to Ralf Burmester, a media lawyer based in Hamburg.

"Whether it's a pamphlet, Twitter, or on the radio, it is forbidden to publish results before polls close because there is always the danger of voter manipulation," Burmester told news agency dpa.

Officials worried about leaks in federal polls

With the federal elections coming up on September 27, authorities worry that leaks on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook could influence poll results.

Germany's federal Election Commissioner , Roderich Egeler warned of a similar breach of the law during the general election.

"I urge all election research institutes who conduct exit polls to be extremely restrictive in how they handle the results," Egeler said in a statement in Wiesbaden.

It's not the first time in Germany that election results have broken first on Twitter. On May 23 this year, the outcome of the vote for president, which Horst Koehler won, were up on Twitter before the speaker of parliament, Norbert Lammert, made the results public.

sp/gb/dpa/AP

Editor: Chuck Penfold