Chip Paper: Dutch Elections confound pollsters, pundits and computers

Chip Paper: Dutch Elections confound pollsters, pundits and computers

 

By

 

 Maarten Doude van Troostwijk

 

Wednesday's Dutch elections have radically shaken up the composition of parliament, making the formation of a new government a difficult task. All three traditional main parties lost seats whilst alternatives on the left and right made sometimes impressing gains.

   The Christian Democrats of Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende did relatively well, losing only a handful of seats and maintaining its position as the country's largest political party. Its Liberal coalition partner on the right, however, suffered a severe setback, rendering the continuation of the governing coalition numerically impossible without the support of several smaller rightwing parties.

   On the left, the opposition Social Democrats dropped ten seats (parliament contains 150 seats in total), whilst the traditionally more radical Socialist Party almost tripled their number to 26, making it the third biggest party.

   The Freedom Party of Geert Wilders – the new kid on the block – scored nine seats, mainly attracting voters concerned about the further "islamisation" of the country, Wilders' key campaign issue. Dutch elections wouldn't be complete without some small new party appearing. In previous parliaments there were parties for the elderly, for instance, this time the animals got their turn. The Party for Animals will send two representatives to the Hague.

   Almost everyone – of course – claimed some sort of victory. The Prime Minister could quite believably claim that the electorate supports his policies of the past few years. This claim, however, sits not very well with the loss of his Liberal coalition partner, the VVD. If policies were so popular, why didn't the VVD remain strong as well, rather than dropping to fourth place in the list?

   The biggest loser of the day, Labour leader Wouter Bos, pointed out – again, quite convincingly - that in general the vote had turned left, given the enormous gains of the Socialist Party. Meanwhile Wilders proved that there was 'space left vacant' on the right by the traditional parties, but now occupied and to be counted with for the future.

   To make matters even more complicated, the Christian Union advocating traditional Christian policies, with an emphasis on the protection of the weak in society – thereby escaping the traditional left-right divide – doubled its parliamentary presence to six members and thus becoming a potential kingmaker in coalition negotiations.

   But in more ways than the final result, this has been an extraordinary election. The campaign was intense, in the sense that all politicians were actively campaigning as never before. Day in day out their faces would appear on television programmes, the Prime Minister even presenting some celebrity gossip show on one of the commercial channels. All media – television, radio, and print – covered all candidates extensively, through interviews, profiles, background stories etc.

   But never did the electorate get a clear grip on what it was the politicians wanted or stood for. Image-making and presentation seemed to have won over the careful presentation of alternative policies. For sure, the PM stated that he wanted to 'finish the job' after all the 'painful but necessary' decisions his cabinet had to make over the past few years. The left, of course, painted a picture of a cold and detached government and presented itself as the more social and inclusive option.

   But neither political leader dared to commit himself to a particular coalition before the vote, As a result of this 'all options are on the table' strategy, up to 40% of the electorate indicated in the week before the vote that it had not made up its mind. The media- and image-driven 'floating politicians' had produced a massive 'floating electorate', leading to the extraordinary, never-seen-before, phenomenon of active campaigning on election day, an electoral 'crime' if ever there was one. Some media, too, ditched some longstanding rules about election reporting. The RTL channel decided to beat its rival, the public NOS network, by releasing exit polls before the voting was over.

   As if to underline the importance of 'media management' in this campaign, the PM's campaign team had positioned a group of youngsters behind Balkenende when he made his after-election speech. These youngsters were instructed to chant 'Four more years! Four more years!' – in English! Apart from the fact that this was clearly an American import, 'four more years' is not quite applicable to Dutch politics. Balkenende's first cabinet lasted barely three months and his second government didn't complete its term either.

   And then there is the issue of voting machines. This election has made clear that the use of these machines is detrimental to the openness of the electoral process, and on top of that, completely useless. The use of computers, mainly produced by a Dutch company by the name of Nedap, has met with some well-reported resistance from the public. Moreover, the Irish Commission on Electronic Voting researched the machines already in 2004 and advised the Irish government not to use the systems. The Irish government took that advice. Furthermore, it was discovered that machines produced by SDU – a competitor of Nedap – could be 'tapped'; with a bit of technical know-how anyone could find out how people voted by 'listening' to the machine using some easily available equipment. Because of these fears and  faults, 35 councils were prohibited from using these voting machines and had to return to the old-fashioned pen-and-paper method. Not the least among these local councils was the city of Amsterdam – the capital and the largest electoral district in the country. Anecdotal reports indicated that voters actually liked and preferred to vote by paper. But more importantly, the city produced its finals results at around half past eleven on election night, two and a half hours after the polls closed, destroying the argument that computer voting is so much quicker in producing results, one of the very few sensible arguments in favour of computers in the first place. The main point, though, is that the software used in counting the votes is a secret. Nobody, not even the election commission, is able to check the results of a count. Yet it is the express right of every citizen to contest results and demand a recount – a right that has quietly disappeared in the impenetrable workings of a computer chip.