Wednesday local elections take place in the Netherlands. Due to pandemic measures, in each municipality a number of polling stations are also open on Monday and Tuesday, to better spread out the number of people. As I will not be in Amersfoort much this week, I took the opportunity to vote this morning immediately.
Polling station in Amersfoort
Van verschillende kanten hoor ik “het lijkt wel of ik steeds linkser ben geworden in de loop der jaren”. Dat is het niet lijkt me, het Overton venster schuift al tijden naar rechts op. Ook gisteren zichtbaar.
This is pretty cool. Dutch media site vice.nl has this as their front page on this election day: “The internet can wait. Go vote.” Underneath a link to the ‘where’s my polling station‘ map the NGO I chair makes with open data.
Screenshot of vice.nl with their ‘go vote’ front page.
Today we had national parliamentary elections. Just before lunch E and I went to vote. As usual voting was uneventful, this time with added face masks and hand sanitizer.
Our neighbourhood polling station
This time around, to enable people to avoid lines, our city published live data on how busy polling stations are. Allowing you to choose one without too many people (you can pick any polling station in the municipality you reside in). Based on public data streams, and on Open Street Map. Well done.
amersfoort.stemdrukte.nl showing current activity at polling stations
The Open State Foundation (I’m a board member) published their current map of polling stations again at ‘Where’s my polling station‘, as they did for the national elections 4 years ago and the local elections since then. Their map is also Open Street Map based. OSF gets their data from each single municipality and republishes it as a national dataset.
Waarismijnstemlokaal.nl, where is my polling station, with info on each polling station in the Netherlands
Good to see how open data is used to strengthen the democratic process in its most direct form.
Time to start orient myself in earnest on the various candidates for the European Parliament in 2 weeks. Received candidate lists in the mail today. #govote #ep2019
