‘Municipalities must put election results on their site in open data format’

Minister Kajsa Ollongren of the Interior aims to submit a bill before the end of this year that will oblige municipalities to publish election results in open data format on their municipal websites.

The minister writes in a letter to the House of Representatives that she has already pointed out to municipalities on several occasions that the Election Act guidelines for municipalities, which have existed since 1 January 2019, are to be able to scan the official reports of the polling stations and of the mayor’s statements with vote totals of to be published by the municipality on the municipal website. She said she sent reminders about this before and after the last elections in March, but that did not always have the desired result.

“The fact that many municipalities have nevertheless not published the documents may be due to the fact that these were the first elections where this obligation was applicable. That does not alter the fact that I regret that many municipalities have not (fully) complied with this. the transparency and verifiability of the process of determining the result intended by the legal provisions has not been sufficiently achieved. Transparency and verifiability of the calculation of the results are essential in order to be able to have (and maintain) confidence in the results of the elections,” said the minister.

Ollongren has since written to municipalities again to comply with the regulations, in the run-up to the European Parliament election on May 23. Ollongren will repeat this again just before the elections and afterwards she will check whether the results have actually been published.

This step by the minister has its origin in an investigation by de Volkskrant, broadcaster KRO-NCRV and the Open State Foundation. On that basis, the Standing Committee on the Interior has asked Ollongren to respond to the results of that investigation. This showed that the new legal guidelines for the transparency of election results are often ignored. In three quarters of the 355 municipalities, the ballot box results were no longer available, very difficult to find or not to consult at all, concludes de Volkskrant. The three investigating parties then requested the results from the municipalities where the data was missing, after which the results of 340 municipalities became available in a tool from de Volkskrant.

Pointer from TV broadcaster KRO-NCRV points out in a message about the joint investigation that not all municipalities are excited about the request to still publish on the website. The municipality of Olst-Wijhe did not publish anything online, because according to the municipality this is ‘not allowed according to the web guidelines’. Many municipalities found it impossible to upload a CSV file, or it was automatically converted to a PDF. There were also municipalities that had put the data online, but it was removed after a few weeks. Some municipalities simply forgot to publish or thought it was too much work.