They never had their ballot papers. Their ballot paper did not arrive in the Netherlands on time – or may never arrive again. Or they found the procedure far too complicated and left it altogether.
And so it turned out that the 37,000 Dutch people abroad who had registered only 26,000 valid postal votes for the new Senate. In addition to satisfaction – the indirect voting for the senate by this group of voters was a first – there was also dissatisfaction on Sunday during the ‘Electoral College Festival’ of the Stichting Nederlanders Buiten Nederland (SNBN). “This was a very good first time, but how can we reach even more people and how do we get a higher turnout?” Iris Bos of GroenLinks wondered.
electors
Because Dutch people abroad – it is unknown exactly how many there are – do not live in a Dutch province, they never had any influence on the Senate, which is elected through the Provincial Council. After a constitutional amendment, they now have their own ‘non-resident electoral college’. From this, 25 ‘electors’ were chosen, who will choose the senate on Tuesday together with the Provincial Council from all over the Netherlands.
GroenLinks became the largest party among Dutch people abroad, followed by D66 and VVD.
So much for the good news. Because hundreds of complaints have been received at SNBN about the voting procedure, according to chairman Eelco Keij. Voting by mail causes votes to be lost, partly because postal services are not well organized in many countries. At the municipality of The Hague, where the ‘foreign’ votes are counted, nearly 700 ballots arrived too late last Friday. So they don’t count.
Complicated
Voting by mail often causes problems. In the last parliamentary elections, in 2021, almost 93,000 Dutch people abroad registered, but only 63,000 of them cast a valid vote.
During the parliamentary elections in 2021, people over seventy in the Netherlands were allowed one-time postal votes because of corona; that often went wrong then.
There is also criticism of the voting itself. It is complicated (the ballot paper must be placed in the white envelope, the postal vote certificate, a copy of the passport plus a signature must be placed in the orange envelope, and then the envelopes must be put back together) and there are questions about privacy, due to the sending of the copy of the passport.
“It is quite strange that we still have that rumbling with all those envelopes,” concluded Roy van Run of the VVD list during the Electoral Festival.
Bad experiences
To do something about this, earlier this month at a conference of D66 a motion adopted calling for the introduction of a pilot digital voting for Dutch citizens abroad. According to that motion, voting by mail is “inaccessible, highly accessible and unsafe” and leads to many complaints every election.
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But previous experiences with digital voting are bad. Last century, the Netherlands was one of the front runners: voting in Dutch elections was then possible with voting computers in physical polling stations. At the end of the day, one push of a button was enough to cast the votes. In 2006, Rop Gongreep, hacker and co-founder of internet provider XS4ALL, demonstrated with his foundation We Trust Voting Computers Not how voting computers could be ‘eavesdropped’ from a distance, which could lead to a violation of voting secrecy. After a critical report of the Korthals Altes committee in 2007, digital voting was abolished and voting via the large paper ballot paper and the red pencil was reintroduced.
Manipulation
The dangers have not diminished in recent years. There is fear of interference and manipulation from countries such as Russia and China.
“As a result, the reluctance to experiment has increased enormously,” concluded professor of computer security at Radboud University Nijmegen Bart Jacobs on Sunday during the – physical and digital – electoral festival. What is difficult, he added, is that voters first have to identify themselves via DigiD, for example, but then have to be able to vote anonymously. “That requires a high level of trust in the fragile, vulnerable voting process. You shouldn’t want to expose that to these risks. Manipulation by Russia, for example, cannot be reversed afterwards.”
Member of Parliament for the VVD Ruben Brekelmans, a guest at the festival, was not dismissive of new digital experiments, but also pointed to the insecurity of digital voting: “In the Netherlands, we do not have 100 percent track record when it comes to IT.”
But Eelco Keij of SNBN still hopes for speed. Not only is the current voting system “leaky”, it is also outdated: “People read newspapers online, do everything online. They are no longer suitable for this postal voting system and think: never mind. Then they will not vote.”