Where is my polling station

WaarIsMijnStemlokaal.nl

Since the 2017 elections to the House of Representatives, we have been collecting data from all polling stations in the Netherlands for every election. We do this in cooperation with the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, VNG Realization and the Electoral Council on the platform ‘Where is my polling station‘. Voters can find their nearest polling station on WaarIsMijnStemlokaal.nl and see how accessible their polling station is.

Through an open standard, all municipalities can upload data about their polling stations on the platform. These data are open data and can be reused in all kinds of applications.

The data is also often used to map and analyze election results by polling station. The Volkskrant has published such analyses for elections in 2019, 2022 and 2023. Pointer of KRO-NCRV has also made use of ‘Where is my polling station’ data. Renowned Dutch news outlet NOS published an article in 2023 about the number and accessibility of polling stations based on Open State’s ‘Where is my polling station’ data.

STATUS

Lobby

Lobby
Data available

Data available
Release and Tools

Release and tools
Durable releasing

Durable releasing
Reuse

Reuse

Lobby

In 2018, 50% of municipalities provided data. By 2023, it was 86%. So the project now has a lot of support, but is not yet at 100%.

Data beschikbaar

The name and location are available for all polling stations. If municipalities do not supply the data themselves, we complete it. Often certain data such as polling station numbers are then missing. Also, not all fields concerning accessibility are mandatory.

Ontsluiten en hulpmiddelen

The data is available through Dataplatform. They ensure that the data is also available through data.overheid.nl.

Duurzame ontsluiting

Municipalities now still have to provide the polling station data themselves every year. We try to make that as easy as possible, but this is not ideal. In 2023 we made an automatic link with the software Stembureaumanager used by part of the municipalities. Nine municipalities used this to simply provide their data in "Common Ground" fashion. We want to make this possible for all municipalities in the future.

Hergebruik

The data is available in various file formats and through an API. LocalFocus, among others, uses it during each election to create its own polling station maps for news websites, reusing the data hundreds of thousands of times.