At least 2,171 voters that cast their votes electronically received the wrong ballot papers on June 9. That’s according to a report by the official body whose job it is to check that the validity of votes cast electronically. The report forms the basis of an article in Wednesday’s edition of the daily ‘De Standaard’. VRT News has also read the report. It states that “It can’t be ruled out that this had an impact on the final distribution of seats”
On 9 June Belgians over the age of 18 were able to cast 3 votes (4 in the case of voters in the German Language Community and those that voted for a Dutch-speaking party in Brussels). Minors over the age of 16 and non-Belgian EU nationals were only able to vote for the European Parliament. However, on polling day there were numerous reports of minors and non-Belgian EU nationals being able to vote not only for the European Parliament, but also for the regional and federal parliaments despite them not being entitled to do so.
It has now been confirmed that this happened on such a scale that in some cases it may have impacted the distribution of seats.
The body that examined the electronic voting notes that in many polling stations the number of votes cast does not tally with the number of voters that turned up to vote there. "Only in a minority of polling stations were no mistakes founds”.
The issue is not with the voting computers but with human error that led to voters being given the wrong voting card and them being able to cast votes that they were not entitled to cast.
At least 2,171 voters received wrong voting card
All the electoral cantons in Brussels and the German-Language community were checked and a sample of 5 cantons was checked in Flanders. In a least 2,171 cases voters were found to have been issued with the wrong polling card. The lion’s share of the mistakes (1,700 or 0.3% of the total number of votes) were discovered in Brussels.