IVU.elect: Kiesraad

European elections in the Netherlands

The Netherlands are going to the polls and opting for IVU

On 4 June 2009, the Netherlands became the first EU country to cast their votes in the European elections, appointing 26 of the 736 seats in the European Parliament. The electoral council in charge in the Netherlands (Kiesraad) organises the country-wide elections for the 1st and 2nd chamber as well as for the European Parliament. It checks and registers parties standing for election. It also checks and confirms the candidate lists, monitors the entire handling of the election and publishes the official election results.
 
The task
In July 2008, the Kiesraad issued an invitation to tender for a software package to monitor the entire electoral process. The package should ensure the security of the data, the reliability of the results and the transparency of the entire election process in accordance with the requirements of the State Secretary of the Interior. Other criteria included straightforward installation of the software as well as an easy-to-use, intuitive user interface since the system was to be installed in a distributed manner on local computers for safety reasons.

The solution
The Dutch electoral council opted for the system offered by IVU for carrying out elections. IVU.elect had already proven its reliability in the federal and state elections in Germany. IVU developed the system for carrying out, documenting and presenting elections in full in cooperation with the German Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) in 2002. It was overhauled for the European Elections in Germany and modularised in such a way that it could be adapted and implemented in accordance with Dutch electoral law in an extremely short space of time. The Kiesraad also commissioned an independent institute to confirm, in a detailed source code analysis, the functionality and security of the system as well as its compliance with the requirements of the State Secretary of the Interior.

The system supports all three phases of an election: preparing the election, carrying it out and performing post-election work. Prior to the European election, the Kiesraad provided the parties with the software for maintaining the candidate list. It then verified and published the candidate list which was submitted. On the evening of the election, the votes which had been counted manually were collected by the communes and sent to the next higher level in encoded form via standardized interfaces (EML). IVU.elect aggregated the votes again there, before calculating the seat distribution centrally at state level and preparing the election report. In addition, individual communes prepared the official end results with IVU.elect in the form of statistics, documents, presentations with clear graphics, tables and diagrams for the public.

In the days before and after the election, IVU Benelux offered a support hotline in order to ensure everything went smoothly.

IVU.elect was used not only for the European elections but also in local elections and Bundestag elections. It also supports the elections for the First Chamber, provincial elections and referenda.
“We are very happy with IVU as a software supplier. Not only did the company implement a high-quality product which meets the necessary requirements, it also works together with the Kiesraad in deciding how the system can be improved and optimized”, says Ms Rosalinde Hoorweg, secretaris-directeur van de Kiesraad.