After Florida and Harare, a recount in Rotterdam

The municipal election in Rotterdam was plagued by so many incidents mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb has now ordered a complete recount.

Some have likened the situation to Florida in 2000. Others have even drawn the comparison to Harare in 2008. Two places were national elections went awry and recounts were needed. But this is Rotterdam, the Netherlands’ second city. Municipal election held here last Wednesday have provoked a storm of criticism on twitter, blogs, news websites and TV-stations. In a close contest between Labour and Leefbaar Rotterdam, a local, populist party established by the assassinated Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, the two parties both garnered 14 seats out of 45, with Labour becoming the biggest party by a margin of a few hundred votes in a city with more than half a million inhabitants.

Immediately after the elections on March 3 stories surfaced about irregularities at the polls. [see box] Multiple people were said to have been present in voting booths at the same time, in violation of Dutch law. And there have been reports of people casting multiple ballots.

100 missing votes

Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb ( a Labour party member whose position is not being contested – like all Dutch mayors he was appointed directly by the Queen) replaced the entire staff of one polling station on the day of the election. The morning after, 67 ballot boxes, representing a fifth of all votes cast, were recounted.

Aboutaleb then still claimed little had gone wrong. The most serious incident uncovered was that 100 votes for Leefbaar Rotterdam had gone uncounted. This had no impact on either the division of seats in the city council or on which party yielded the most votes. It did however narrow down the margin separating Labour and Leefbaar Rotterdam to a mere 600 votes.

On Tuesday, the chairman of one polling station came forward to report the possible theft of ballots and said he had seen people soliciting voters at at least two stations. Aboutaleb then acknowledged that 100 to 140 incidents had been reported.

Leefbaar Rotterdam had already demanded a full recount, but now more and more parties wanted to put an end to the rumours. After two former mayors of Rotterdam also called on Aboutaleb, he ordered a full recount of all votes cast in Rotterdam. The mayor said he “wanted to take away the societal unrest over the municipal election results,” adding that “the results of municipal elections should be crystal clear on how many votes have been cast and for whom”.

His decision is an odd one, because just last Friday Aboutaleb had called the results definitive and he was still awaiting an official advise into the matter from a special electoral committee.

The recount will be the first in the Netherlands since the 1980s, according to Melle Bakker, the secretary general of the Netherlands’ electoral council.

100+ incidents at the polls Election day in Rotterdam was plagued by more than 100 incidents at the polls. A selection: One polling station was left unstaffed for several minutes. Voters were required to take their own ballots. Some voters took several. Some polling stations had the flag of a political party on display. Party members or supporters were present at some polling stations to persuade voters to cast their vote for a certain party. Two or more people were found in polling booths simultaneously dozens of times. The law only allows handicapped people to receive assistance. 2.500 voters received two or three ballots at home. Some votes were counted double. One ballot box turned out to be empty at the end of election day. It has been reported that members of some polling stations staffs offered explanations to voters in Turkish or Moroccan, perhaps even doling out advice on who to vote for.

A local face-off followed nationwide

The elections in Rotterdam are hotly contested because the face-off between Labour and the Leefbaar Rotterdam is drawing national attention. Even though only major shifts in the vote tally would lead to a redistribution of seats in city council, the party that gets the most votes has some very real extra power: it gets to take the initiative in forging a new governing coalition.

The elections also cast an ominous shadow over the national elections that will be held on June 9. A tight race is then expected between some of the same players, and the fractured electorate will make it extraordinarily difficult to forge a governing coalition at the national level.

Leefbaar Rotterdam sees the recount as an “enormous victory,” said Ronald Buijt, a councillor for the local party. Last week, Labour tried to paint his party as a bunch of sore losers. “Friday Aboutaleb said nothing was wrong and four day later he feels a lot has gone wrong,” Buijt said, demanding an independent inquiry on top of the recount. “For the first time in the Netherlands people working at polling stations have been dismissed and security forces needed to be deployed. That means something is amiss,” he said.

Send in the civil servants

The chaos in Rotterdam raises the question whether Dutch elections, conducted with red pencils and paper ballots, are reliable.

Jan Vis, a retired professor of constitutional law, thinks they are. He feels comparisons with Harare and Florida are blown out of proportion. “The Netherlands is one of the most shipshape parliamentary democracies in the world. Perhaps two people occupied voting booths simultaneously in Rotterdam, but that cannot be compared to the irregularities that take place in elections in Baghdad, Kabul or the United States. The Netherlands is one of the most prim and proper countries in the world when it comes to parliamentary history. Corruption and bribery are unheard of here,” Vis said.

Rinus van Schendelen, a professor of political science at Rotterdam’s Erasmus University disagrees. He feels the number of incidents in Rotterdam was too large and the types of incidents too varied to dismiss. According to Van Schendelen, Aboutaleb should have acted sooner. “A recount will probably only take away some of the scepticism felt by voters. Some complaints cannot be rebutted by recounting votes.” Like Leefbaar Rotterdam, he feels an inquiry is needed. “This would only strengthen Aboutaleb’s position.”

Meanwhile, Aboutaleb hopes to start recounting votes on Sunday or Monday, meaning the new results should be known by Tuesday. Mayor Aboutaleb does not expect them to be very different from the first count.