How reliable are the elections? ‘Not perfect, but not an urgent problem’

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  Joost Schellevis

  editor Tech

If you now ask Rop Gongrijp whether the elections can be trusted, he will give a completely different answer than in 2006. In that year, with the action group “We Don’t Trust Voting Computers”, he managed to convince people that the voting computers used were not safe. That led to a year later reintroduction of paper voting.

“The process is not yet perfect, but it is not that we have an urgent problem. You can go to sleep safely,” says Gongrijp, also known as a privacy activist and co-founder of internet provider XS4ALL. According to him, meaningful fraud is virtually impossible. How different it was in 2006: “Back then I really wouldn’t have dared to rule out abuse during the elections.”

Many improvements have been made in recent years to make the voting process more transparent and secure. For example, holes in the so-called counting software were closed – although voting computers are no longer used, all those paper votes still have to be added together. In the past, this adding software turned out to have several security problems, which have now been resolved.

The paper counting process has also been made more transparent in recent years: observers at polling stations are allowed to take photos of the so-called official reports, in which the results are recorded. Municipalities will also publish these themselves, together with the digital counting files, so that citizens can check the results. In addition, the new Electoral Act, which came into effect this year, ensures faster recounts in the event of irregularities.

The election process is therefore more under a magnifying glass than before, notes Wim Voermans, professor of constitutional and administrative law at Leiden University. “Confidence in the elections took a serious hit as early as 2006 because of the fuss about the voting computer,” says Voermans. Forum for Democracy also questioned the voting process in the 2021 House of Representatives elections.

“And in other countries, such as the United States, you saw things go wrong with all kinds of conspiracy theories. That is why the Electoral Council is now on top of it.” Not without results: “It’s really well put together.”

Voermans does suspect that the paper voting process causes distrust among young people. “A digital generation has emerged that is used to computers; the fact that they are suddenly put in a box with paperwork may not inspire confidence.”

Yet a return to the voting computer is unlikely: the consensus among election researchers is that it leads to an unnecessary number of vulnerabilities. Moreover, the voting process is much more difficult to understand and control. “When we still had voting computers, there were three people in the Netherlands who understood exactly how it worked,” says Gongrijp. A paper counting process is much more intuitive to understand.

At the same time, the election process is not yet perfect. The adding software that is still used was repeatedly found to contain errors. These have been closed, but ultimately the software will have to be completely replaced.

The technology remains an Achilles heel: the IT supplier that distributes the software could in theory build in a backdoor to manipulate the results, sources confirm to the NOS. This could also be the case if an attacker breaks into the company. “The system is now unnecessarily vulnerable, because there is a lot of trust with one supplier,” says one of them.

But in practice, tampering with the software would not go unnoticed, other sources report. “In practice, you will notice if the counting of votes is incorrect, because additional safeguards have been built in.” Citizens can also add up the results themselves and detect possible irregularities. Because the counts are also transmitted on paper and compared with the digital count, fraud should always be identified.

For the first time in these elections, “election observers” will go to polling stations in an organized context, as part of the Controle-Verkiezingen.nl project.

The organizers also include the former Viruswaarheid and Samen voor Nederland by Michel Reijinga, known for the corona demonstrations. Although they are not known for their trust in the government, the initiative was not born out of distrust, says Dennis Spanjestra of Controle-Elections. “Our goal is precisely to strengthen trust.”

Because there is mistrust, says Spaanstra. “That’s also because people don’t understand it.” Watching helps: “Then they see that a party that is the largest in the results also has the largest piles at the polling station.”

Professor Voermans is not very concerned about distrust in the elections. “As long as turnout remains high, many people still find it worthwhile to vote.” And it is still relatively high in the Netherlands. “Even in the corona year of 2021, when there was quite a bit of distrust of the government.”