“We counted three times in the evening and everything was correct,” says Myriam van Loon. “The ballots were then sent to the central location and counted again. I really don’t know where the mistake is.”
Van Loon (74) and a number of fellow Tilburg residents attended polling station 21 until midnight during the House of Representatives elections on November 22, in De Goede Herder Parish Hall in Tilburg-West. Maybe “for the tenth time already,” she says, and that is “always nice because you meet so many people from the neighborhood for a chat.”
But so much doubt has since arisen around the results of this one polling station that a recount was deemed necessary. Because 1,137 electoral cards were handed in at De Goede Herder on Wednesday, but there were only 1,113 ballots in the bin ballot box at the polling station. Where have the other 24 gone – if they are indeed lost?
Those 24 votes are more than the official margin of a maximum of fifteen votes, and exactly equal to a newly introduced margin of error of 2.1 percent of the total number of votes. Three other polling stations in Tilburg also indicated that they also saw “inexplicable”, albeit smaller differences.
On Saturday morning, during a scheduled plenary meeting, the House of Representatives confirmed the advice of a House committee that monitors compliance with the correct voting and counting procedures, and gave the green light for a recount.
Around 1 p.m., the black and blue wheelie bins were rolled into the canteen of the local environmental service, the Brabants Afval Team (BAT) in Tilburg-Oost, and wheeled past the ping-pong table to the head of four long tables, one per polling station to be checked. . There they were opened and the thick packets of ballots emerged, under flash and TV lights from the press, as if it were the discovery of Dead Sea Scrolls. After which the rolling out, sorting, recounting and counting of votes per candidate began.
White vest
With around 6,000 tickets in total to go, the organization expected to be ready and announce the results by the end of Saturday afternoon.
Rob and Renate van Malsen, both in white vests, sit at table 3 and help with the recount of votes for De Goede Herder. Renate is a municipal employee and was asked on Friday at eleven o’clock in the evening whether she was available. Her husband Rob also came along. Of the more than thirty volunteers in white, green and yellow vests, the majority work for the municipality of Tilburg. Some of them work at the logistics service that also transported the ballot boxes, but were not previously involved in the counting. There is coffee, sandwiches appear. “You hear grumbling about civil servants,” says one of them, “but we are just standing here on our day off.”
Municipalities have “a sense of pride around the voting process,” says Harmen Krul, Member of Parliament (CDA) and member of the House committee that recommended a recount. After the vote in the House, Krul and three other members traveled to Tilburg to monitor the process, as prescribed by law. “That is precisely why it is so sad for Tilburg that that municipality is now being singled out,” he says.
But according to him it was necessary, because “four out of 78 polling stations with an unexplained deviation is relatively many. And 24 shortages at one office is actually a striking number.”
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In addition, there were five polling stations in the Netherlands with an anomaly, but they were spread out, and one anomalous (small) result at one of the four hundred polling stations in Rotterdam was no reason to start a recount there.
Limited recounts are nothing new in local and national elections in the Netherlands. But since former American president Donald Trump tried to discredit the voting and counting procedures in the US after he lost the 2020 elections, doubts about results have been sensitive.
MP Krul: “There is no reason for this, it is just so nice to see how transparent the Netherlands has arranged this process.”
Public recount
According to Dutch law – just like in the US – recounting is public. But until 4 p.m. in the afternoon, not a concerned or even interested citizen showed up at the counting tables in Tilburg.
The result of the recount is expected to be announced on Saturday evening, after which the Electoral Council, in jargon, will “draft up an official report” and inform the House of this on Monday. There is a good chance that the recount will again show a small deviation compared to the two previous counts (those of the polling stations and the central count). If it does not fall outside the margins, that is not a problem.