Create national portal for transparent election results (NL0040)

What is the public problem that the commitment will address? Interested parties have insufficient insight into the way in which the results of elections are determined. As a result, they are often unable to address any errors in the counting of votes or in the calculation of the result (before the result of the election is determined). As a result, errors can no longer be corrected.

What is the commitment? The electoral act will be changed in three parts to solve this problem: 1) All (approximately 9,500) polling stations in the Netherlands record the results of an election in their polling station on an official report. All these official reports are scanned by the 355 municipalities and published on the websites of the municipalities (implementation: realized on 1 January 2019). 2) The municipalities aggregate the results of all polling stations using digital tools. The central electoral committee totals the results of all municipalities with the help of digital tools. The resulting digital files are published on the website of the municipalities or the central electoral committee (implementation expected on 1 January 2022). 3) The national government will provide a portal on the internet with links to the websites of all municipalities that contain the digital files. For example, interested parties can consult all the aforementioned files via one website, which prevents them from having to look up the websites of all individual municipalities (implementation expected on 1 January 2022).

How will the commitment contribute to solving the public problem? By publishing the aforementioned files on the internet, interested parties can check the calculation of the result of an election. They can also check whether mistakes have been made. They can raise any errors (before the result becomes final) with the responsible 9 authorities, so that the results can be corrected before the result is determined.

Why is this commitment relevant to OGP values? The measures increase the accessibility of information about the formation of the results of an election. Leading to transparency and more accountability. Before 2019, the official reports of the polling stations were only available for inspection at the town hall for a short time. By prescribing that the scanned official reports are published on the internet, interested parties can check the development of the election results from home, instead of having to go to all individual town halls for this.

Additional information - Milestone Activity with a verifiable deliverable Start Date: End Date: All municipalities aggregate the results of all polling stations using digital tools. Jan 2021 Jan 2022 The central electoral committee aggregates the results of all municipalities with the help of digital tools. Jan 2021 Jan 2022 The aggregated results are published on the website of the municipalities or the central electoral committee. Jan 2021 Jan 2022 The national government will provide a portal on the Internet with links to the websites of all municipalities that contain the digital files with the results of the elections. Jan 2021 Jan 2022

Action Plan Review

Commitment 2: Transparency of the electoral process

Results Report

Commitment 2. Transparency of the Electoral Process

● Verifiable: Yes

● Does it have an open government lens? Yes

● Potential for results: Modest

● Completion: Substantial

● Did it open government? Marginal

The Senate adopted the bill ‘New Procedure for Determining Election Results’ on 14 June 2022, containing several amendments to the Elections Act. The most important is the introduction of a new way of determining election results. This includes the possibility of centralized vote counting, which has been experimented with since 2014, in the Elections Act. The new law entered into force on 1 January 2023. During the action plan period (since late 2019), there has been a slight improvement in the number of municipalities that meet the publication requirements compared to before the action plan. [20] However, there are no exact numbers available on compliance among municipalities, so the IRM considers this commitment to be substantially, rather than fully, completed. As mentioned in the IRM Action Plan Review, public trust in elections in the Netherlands is already high and this commitment represented an incremental, but positive improvement in this area.