On March 15, 2017, general elections are held in The Netherlands. Open State Foundation believes that the Central Elections Council needs to open and publish more data on the process of the elections. Only recently it opened up election results data but for example lists of candidates and other information necessary for the elections, such as locations of voting are not always available as open data. We want to change that. Below you’ll find information, data and examples of what could be done.
Party programmes | Candidates | Voting locations | Politwoops | Data
Voting locations
Only 7 out of 388 municipalities publish voting locations as open data. The disclosure of these locations helps voters to find their way on election day. Below we have harvested data on actual voting locations from 388 municipal websites. The information comes in various ways and formats (ie. PDF files, screenshots, maps). We have added geometry, municipalities and name of voting district.
Bekijk Stembureaus Tweede Kamerverkiezingen 2017 op volledig scherm. DATA: data.openstate.eu/dataset/locaties-stembureaus.
Where do candidates come from?
What is the gender distribution among candidates?
From the candidateslists (find data below) we found the following gender distribution among candidates by political party. Have a look at stemopeenvrouw.com where we looked at the polls and what that would mean for the number of seats by women in parliament.
Search through party programmes
Search through the election programmes of political parties
Politwoops
More than ever before, politicians make use of social media during elections. Facebook is popular but especially during election debates on radio and TV, Twitter remains popular. Sometimes politicians regret what they posted and delete their messages. With Politwoops you can search through these deleted tweets and find realtime stats on their Twitter and delete behavior.
Data
Most of the data that we use are not published as open data by the Central Elections Council. However we have extracted the data out of PDF-files or harvested from municipal websites. We have made the data available on our own data portal. Here you can find open candidates lists, political party registry, filed candidates lists per election district, valid candidates lists per election district, names and gender en voting locations (work in progress).