News item | 16-02-2023 | 06:00
There will be a higher penalty for recruiting proxy votes. The sentence ranges from a maximum of one month’s detention to a maximum of six months’ imprisonment. There is also a clearer and sharper definition of what is meant by recruitment. This is stated in the bill by Minister Hanke Bruins Slot (Internal Affairs and Kingdom Relations) that went into consultation today. In this way, recruitment of proxy votes can be tackled more quickly and punished more severely in the future.
If you do not want or cannot go to the polling station during elections, you can ask someone else to vote for you: give someone a power of attorney. Then you give someone the confidence to cast your vote. The initiative for granting a proxy must always come from the voter himself. If someone else approaches a voter with a request to issue a proxy, that is recruiting. That is punishable. But in practice and from research by the Electoral Council, recruitment appears to be difficult to really tackle and punish.
Bruins Slot: “Elections are the basis of our democratic constitutional state. Your vote is worth so much. With your vote you influence who comes for you in, for example, the city council or the House of Representatives. You only vote if you want to, and only for whoever you want. With this bill we ensure that we can tackle recruitment earlier and punish more severely. Recruiting proxy votes does not fit in our democracy, where everyone is in charge of his or her own vote.”
Crime description at the time
The definition is brought up to date in this bill. At the moment, the legal description of the offense is based on the classic form of recruitment: collecting powers of attorney from house to house and in person. Recruiting must also be done ‘systematically’ in order to be punishable. With the intended new law, other forms of recruitment will soon also fall under this, such as addressing a group of people once with the call to cast proxy votes, or posting a message to that effect on social media.
Adjustment threshold for allocation of residual seat
In the bill that has entered consultation, the threshold for allocating a residual seat is also adjusted. Soon a political party will first have to obtain a seat on its own (100% of the electoral quota) before it is eligible for a residual seat. This has already been arranged for the parliamentary elections. The bill provides that this will also apply to other elections (with the exception of elections to the Senate). The Minister of the Interior and Kingdom Relations already announced this in her evaluation of the municipal elections of March last year.
Consultation
The consultation can be found at www.internetconsultatie.nl/kieswetdiversen and will run until 16 April.
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