Voters can easily find their nearest voting station for the upcoming Provincial Council, Water Board and European elections in 2019! The Dutch Interior Ministry, Association of Netherlands Municipalities and the Open State Foundation developed 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 started a cooperation to find a more sustainable solution to this problem. Open State Foundation built a platform where municipalities can upload their data via a format that has been proposed by the Association of Netherlands Municipalities. This platform is able to generate visualisations of polling stations and also make the data available as open data via a webservice (API). This platform will make sure that re-users can make tools to help people find their nearest polling station.