No new election in Rotterdam

Rotterdam city council has found the elections of March 3 were fair, in spite of the numerous irregularities that took place all over the city.

The council came to this conclusion on Wednesday night. Earlier in the day, a special committee charged with safeguarding the integrity of the elections had also concluded, on the basis of its own inquiry, that a rerun would be unnecessary. In certain districts, multiple people had been found simultaneously occupying voting booths. The committee concluded, however, that these irregularities could not have had an effect on the distribution of council seats.

Last week, the council had ordered a full recount of votes. Labour garnered the most votes (28.9 percent) in both counts, with populist-right Leefbaar Rotterdam coming in a close second (28.6 percent). Based on the recount conducted last Thursday, the margin between the two parties was only 754 votes. Both parties won 14 seats in the city council.

Leefbaar Rotterdam also agreed to recognise the elections last Wednesday, effectively conceding its narrow loss to Labour. “Right now, Rotterdam is best served with these results, which open the door to a coalition government, rather than a grim rerun election,” said Marco Pastors, leader of Leefbaar Rotterdam.

His words were a thinly veiled invitation to Labour leader Dominic Schrijer, who has often ruled out the possibility of governing with Leefbaar Rotterdam. Since Leefbaar Rotterdam levelled “crude attacks” at Rotterdam’s Labour mayor, Ahmed Aboutaleb, Schrijer says the two parties have “irreconcilable differences in perspective” and “the last thing Rotterdam needs now is a marriage of convenience”.

Leefbaar had earlier insisted on new elections in districts where a large number of irregularities had been reported. The party claimed polling station staff had assisted in filling out proxy voting forms and helped people pick a candidate. Both are violations of Dutch election law.

Pastors now positive

Prior to Wednesday night’s debate, Pastors had already responded positively to the election committee’s findings. “But the true winner of these elections will never be known,” he said, adding that his party would have been the biggest if the committee “had bothered to examine the 2,000 invalid votes.” The special committee including a representative of Leefbaar Rotterdam.

After interviewing the chiefs of several polling stations, the electoral committee concluded the election in Rotterdam had not been a flawless affair, but it failed to find evidence of undue influencing of voters on a large scale. Most voters occupying a voting booth simultaneously did so “out of pure naiveté”, committee member Bas van Tijn said. Dutch election law bars the practice to safeguard the secrecy of the ballot. “But the same law says that a vote cast that way is accepted,” he added.

The committee recommended better instructions for voters in future, using images rather than text on election day itself. “Pictorial symbols and a short video instruction,” Van Tijn said. Illiteracy rates are relatively high in Rotterdam. Approximately one out of six inhabitants can neither read nor write. Nationwide, the figure is one out of ten.

‘Forgotten’ votes

The recount showed 1,202 valid votes had been ‘forgotten’ in the election night count held on March 3rd. According to committee member Van Tijn, this number is negligible in comparison to the total of 226,128 votes. His committee chalked up the error to “the logical fact that people will make mistakes, especially at the end of a long and often stressful day”. Van Tijn suggested Dutch election law could be changed to prevent this, by allowing for the votes to be counted outside of the polling station.