Every election day, voters walk into this building, step into a wooden booth and colour in a small circle with a red pencil. It looks like a scene from a century ago. It is in fact a deliberate decision taken in this century, by a country that had already moved on.
From the nineties onwards almost the whole of the Netherlands voted electronically. The machines counted in minutes what used to take a night. Then, around the , a group of campaigners demonstrated that the machines could be tampered with and read from a distance. In October of the following year the withdrew every approval the voting machines had.
In May 2008 the cabinet drew the conclusion. As long as there was no sound alternative, the country would vote with paper and pencil. New equipment could still be eavesdropped on, and developing it was judged too expensive for what it would add.
So the booths came back out of storage. The Hague had been voting electronically for ten or twelve years and needed around eight hundred new ones.
One detail is worth knowing before you ever vote here. The law requires the mark to be red. Any other colour, or a drawing in the margin, makes the ballot invalid.
Sources. Story: Parlement.com, Stemmen op de verkiezingsdag; Adviescommissie inrichting verkiezingsproces (commissie-Korthals Altes), Stemmen met vertrouwen, 2007; besluit ministerraad mei 2008, ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties; Binnenlands Bestuur over de herinvoering van stemhokjes in Den Haag.
