At this moment, Open State Foundation has traced almost all polling stations for the general elections in the Netherlands. Only 7 municipalities publish this information as open data. Open State Foundation has harvested voting locations from 388 municipal websites and traced and mapped 9,036 polling stations in towns and villages for the parliamentary elections of March 15. Open State Foundation harvested the data from municipal websites. And sent a request for the data to 84 municipalities.
The data came in many shapes and forms. For 60 municipalities we had to get the data out of PDF-files. Some municipalities had online maps but without access to the data itself, these sites had to be scraped as well. Most websites published the data but in various forms. Open State Foundation harvested the data and cleaned it.
When processing the information, Open State Foundation found errors in addresses of polling stations. A number of addresses had to be corrected due to typos or description of locations, rather then publishing the address. Only 2,793 polling locations were published with a postal code.
Call
Open State Foundation calls on the Minister of Internal Affairs, the Electoral Council and the municipalities to ensure that this information will be published as open data in such a way that it is findable, accessible and available for reuse.
View Stembureaus Tweede Kamerverkiezingen 2017 in a full screen map. DATA: data.openstate.eu/dataset/locaties-stembureaus.
For data and more information, see Open State’s webpage on the 2017 Dutch elections.
