How can voters easily find their nearest voting station for the upcoming municipal elections and referendum in 2018? The Dutch Interior Ministry, Association of Netherlands Municipalities and the Open State Foundation are developing a platform to make this possible! Via this new platform all municipalities can upload the locations of their polling stations and generate map visualisations to share with their voters.
During the elections for the House of Representatives in 2017, Open State Foundation manually collected all locations of polling stations. This data was standardized and made available as open data. This dataset was used by several websites to help voters find their nearest polling station. Facebook also re-used this data and on election day they published a button in timelines to help people find their station. About one million voters used this platform during the parliamentary elections in 2017,
The Ministry, Association of Netherlands Municipalities and Open State Foundation have now started a cooperation to find a more sustainable solution to this problem. Open State Foundation will build a platform where municipalities can upload their data via a format that has been proposed by the Association of Netherlands Municipalities. This platform will be able to generate visualisations of polling stations and also make the data available as open data via an webservice (API). This platform will make sure that re-users can make tools to help people find their nearest polling station.