E-Voting in the Netherlands; from General Acceptance to General Doubt in Two Years

Abstract

This document is a case study of a country in which e-voting used to be the general norm: The Netherlands. It gives a detailed description of the events in the last two years surrounding e-voting in the Netherlands. During this time, the security and reliability of the voting machines that were used were questioned successfully by an action group. This led to court cases, the withdrawal of the certification of these machines and eventually to a complete stop of their use. In the current situation, The Netherlands reverted back to paper ballot voting at least until a whole new system is designed, approved of by Parliament, built and implemented. In this document the author tries to explain why this happened at this particular time. The paper concludes with some ideas on what other countries that are considering the introduction of e-voting might learn from the Dutch experience.