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raboof
Today is Dutch government election day. I heard a statistic (though I can't find a reference right now) that our population's confidence in a fair count of the votes is at an all-time low, at something like 55%. That worries me: there's plenty that I don't like about our politics and democracy, but if you don't even trust the votes were counted properly, all bets are kinda off. That's why I'm volunteering at a voting station again. I'll share a bit on how that works. 10 comments
raboof
The ballots and the metadata go into separate cars, 2 volunteers per car. Tomorrow, at the municipality, more volunteers and municipality staff do a 'detailed count', counting per-person votes (we vote on people, not parties). The result of this is also put in a 'proces verbaal' and digitized. The digital version goes to the national counting organization. Importantly, all those 'processen verbaal' are published both on the municipality's own website and at the national counting organization.
raboof
This means I can mostly trace the votes that I observed being cast at my local polling station, that I participated in counting ('rougly'), and I can verify there are no serious differences to the 'detailed' count and they are accounted for in the national result. Will there be differences? Sure, there's a lot of manual work. But you can likely observe that those differences are small and noisy enough that they won't affect the final result of the election.
raboof
Is this perfect? No, it's still a bit too hard to actually perform those checks. Also I don't completely understand the process of voter registration, and there's the mail-in votes (for disabled voters and votes living abroad). But all in all, I think we're doing pretty good. Now let's hope the politicians honor the trust we put in them by voting for them!
raboof
@Garonenur actually they don't even have to volunteer, they're welcome to just come and watch. Your point still stands, of course: the more entrenched sceptics won't do that either. Still, I think a good first step in convincing more people that the elections are fair is: actually making sure they're fair ;). 
Sexybiggetje🐖
@raboof that's most likely due to 1) the political mess that was created, and 2) the shenanigans of the last counting where there were multiple issues with counting votes of right parties put an film. Doesn't stop me from voting, if you don't vote you can't complain! 🎉
raboof
@martijn yeah, '1' is of course no reason to distrust the voting process, but likely has an effect. wrt '2', it would be nice if we were better at putting that into perspective as well: because we have so many voting stations, if you run the numbers I think such problems are unlikely to affect the end result, unless there's some huge-scale conspiracy making this happen all over the country. Indeed, vote, but don't let that stop you from making your voice heard the rest of the time! |
Gregory's Server
We have many voting stations: in my town of population of about 100k there are about 100. Each voting station is populated by two shifts of ~5 volunteers, who check the ballot box is empty in the morning, and only registered voters vote (we use paper ballots).
At the end of the day, when the voting has closed, we do a 'rough' (per-party) count, using a 4-eyes sorting and counting system. We write down the results in a 'proces verbaal', and take the ballots and the metadata to the municipality.