Electronic Voting Examples - Netherlands

Netherlands

From the late nineties until 2007, voting machines were used extensively during elections. Most areas in the Netherlands used electronic voting in polling places. After security problems with the machines were widely publicized, they were banned in 2007.

The most widely used voting machines were produced by the company Nedap. In the parliamentary elections of 2006, 21,000 persons used the Rijnland Internet Election System to cast their vote.

On 5. October 2006 the group "Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet" ("We do not trust voting machines") demonstrated on Dutch television how the Nedap ES3B machines could be manipulated in 5 minutes. The exchange of the software would not be recognisable by voters or election officials.

Apparently there was a case of an election official misinforming voters of when their vote is recorded and later recording it himself during municipality elections in Landerd, Netherlands in 2006. A candidate was also an election official and got the unusual amount of 181 votes in the polling place where he was working. In the other three polling places together he got 11 votes. Only circumstantial evidence could be found because the voting machine was a direct-recording electronic voting machine, in a poll by a local newspaper the results were totally different. The case is still under prosecution.

Van Eck phreaking might also compromise the secrecy of the votes in an election using electronic voting. This made the Dutch government ban the use of computer voting machines manufactured by SDU in the 2006 national elections, fearing that secret ballots may not be kept secret.

See also: Dutch general election, 2006: Voting machine controversy

In September 2007 a committee chaired by Korthals Altes reported for the government that it would be better to return to paper voting. The deputy minister for interior Bijleveld said in a first response she would accept the committee's advice, and ban electronic voting. The committee also concluded that the time wasn't ready for voting over Internet. State secretary Ank Bijleveld responded by announcing a return to paper voting.. It was reported in September 2007 that "a Dutch judge has declared the use of Nedap e-voting machines in recent Dutch elections unlawful."