bert hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦Nov 21, 2023
So tomorrow there are national elections in The Netherlands and I need to acquaint you with two oddities. For one, we take our democracy entirely for granted so we mostly vote in.. garbage bins. Secondly, our ballots are HUGE as they list 28 parties and 1128 candidates (no joke). So we need to make good use of the space in the garbage bin. For this purpose, polling stations are equipped with the STEMBUSSTAMPER, specially designed to tamp down wayward ballots:
Show threadRalf StubnerNov 21, 2023
@bert_hubert How does one interact with these candidates? Can one vote for them individually?
The craziest thing I have seen in that regard are regional elections in Bavaria. If your local council has say 40 seats, you get 40 votes. You can just spend them on a single party, but you can also give individual candidates up to 3 votes, even from multiple parties. And if you don't want to give out all votes individually, you can give all the remaining votes to a party list. Typically takes several days to count properly ...
Show threadbert hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦Nov 21, 2023
@rstub as noted by @helma the voting is rather simple. Dutch candidates are extraordinarily approachable. Also, many parties field 50 or 80 candidates even though they might only get 5 seats. Just in case ;-)
Show threadyour auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
@bert_hubert @rstub @helma the parliamentary system is a democratically confusing mess but i'd rather have that than the bullshit elections we have here in USA
Nov 21, 2023 at 9:07pmWeb