Election

It's almost election time. On march 3rd all people in the Netherlands will vote for their town council. It surprises me that in 2006, with the last elections, there was an average attendance of 58.6%. Personally, I'm not very interested in the local authorities of Tilburg, but I do think that if you may vote, you should. Two years ago I turned eightteen and since that day, there was one election for the European Parliament. Although I didn't know very much about all this, I voted anyway. I did some research about the political parties who were in this election and I explored what they were standing for. I did this with the help of the site: www.stemwijzer.nl. I think that many of you will know this site where you can answer several questions, in order to find out on which party you could vote. This is the party that meets your ideas best.

With the upcoming elections for the local authorities, I feel there is a problem. When you will now visit the site of www.stemwijzer.nl you must select the municipality where you live. But, and here is the deal, not every municipality is represented. Almost the whole region of Gelderland is not represented on this site. I found this a bit strange, so I tried to search for some other election tool where you could find more municipalities. This was harder than you might think. StemWijzer recommends people to go to www.kieskompas.nl if their municipality isn't represented. On this site, there were a few different municipalities and also a few from Gelderland, but still not all municipalities in the Netherlands have an election tool.

Since my background lies in Gelderland, I was particularly interested in this region, so I tried to find an election tool where all the 56 municipalities of Gelderland are respresented. Well, I can tell you, there is none. The best site I found, was http://www.omroepgelderland.nl/web/Verkiezingen-2010/Verkiezingen-2010-Nieuws-Artikel/491741/Gelderse-gemeentes-lanceren-stemwijzers.htm. On this site there was an overview of every municipality in Gelderland that has developed an election tool. This was a shocking low number of 10. After a little search I discovered that this overview was just an overview of the municipalities in Gelderland that has developed an election tool for the site www.kieskompas.nl, only here they were grouped as 'the municipalities from Gelderland who developed an election tool'.

I think it is very dissapointing that only 10 out of 56 of the municipalities in Gelderland have developed an election tool. The people in the other 46 municipalities cannot use this great information technology of deciding who to vote for. I won't say this is the only way, but it sure is a lot easier than to read all of the election programs of the participating political parties.

For me, it doesn't matter this election, because I have to vote in Tilburg, a city that actually has an election tool. Not only a tool on the internet on stemwijzer.nl, but today I discovered an election tool oriented on the students of this city. There is a weekly newspaper at the University of Tilburg, called Univers and today I discovered that someone has developed an election tool for the students of Tilburg. Next week, this election tool will be spread over 1900 student residences. This poster contains 27 theses, where the student can either agree or disagree with, or can answer neutral. To know the results, the student has to define weight to each thesis by a range from 1 to 5. A weight of 1 means that the student couldn't care less about this thesis, and a weight of 5 means that the student thinks this is a very important issue. Next the student has to do a simple sum, and he/she knows what political party best suits him/her. I must say that I really appreciated this election tool because it really focusses on the students, so all the theses concerns students, unlike the tool on stemwijzer.nl.

Maybe it is an idea for the municipalities to create an election tool focussed on a particular target group. And by that I mean that the political parties should create different election tools such as a general election tool, an election tool for students, an election tool for the elderly etc. I think this really helps people to decide on which party they should vote, because the theses will be much more focused, so the target group can identify more with the theses.

Well, I'm glad that I already know on which party I'm going to vote. For everyone else who doesn't, good luck with finding out!

Kelly