Nearly a thousand votes from abroad arrived late in these elections House of Representatives elections 2023

Nearly a thousand votes from Dutch people living abroad were not counted in the recent House of Representatives elections. The ballot papers had arrived too late, the national electoral committee said de Volkskrant.

The national polling station in The Hague is responsible for counting votes that Dutch people send by letter from abroad. At the last elections, just over 107,000 Dutch voters lived abroad.

In total, almost 70,000 votes came in from abroad. 926 only arrived after the polls closed and therefore could not be counted.

The almost thousand votes could have made a (small) difference. D66 won nine seats and fell 160 votes short of a tenth. The party received 10 percent of the votes from abroad that were received on time.

Due to an “inexplicable counting difference”, the House of Representatives decided to have a rare recount carried out at four polling stations in Tilburg. That did not change the outcome.

More than a quarter of the votes from abroad went to GL-PvdA. The PVV, the big winner of the elections, received only 6 percent of the foreign votes.