Municipalities save money by setting up digital counting and polling stations

Organizing elections is not an easy task. For example, a municipality sends almost 1,200 letters for the composition of the counting and polling stations. Lennik, with the help of the autonomous provincial company VERA, joined forces with other municipalities, such as Meise and Sint-Pieters-Leeuw, and digitized the entire process.

Simplify and digitize labor-intensive processes

​​​During the previous elections, our cities and municipalities sent thousands of letters to set up counting and polling stations and therefore ensure that there are counters and assessors. The municipality of Lennik improved and digitized the system, together with Beveren, Lier, Meise, Sint-Pieters-Leeuw, Torhout and Wetteren. They send their invitations digitally, which is a significant saving in costs and working hours.

To manage the entire project, leader Lennik looked to VERA, the autonomous provincial company of Flemish Brabant that supports local authorities in IT, digitalization and e-government.

“Our municipality is fully committed to digitization. For us, digitization of services is not only a means to simplify administrative processes and make them more efficient, but also to increase customer friendliness and save time for our citizens. With two elections on the horizon, that entail an enormous paper workflow for both councils and citizens, the call from Municipality without a Town Hall was the ideal opportunity to digitize this. And with success: two out of three municipalities use the application today, and one on the two citizens who were contacted digitally responded digitally. We can therefore rightly call it a successful process,” says Irina De Knop, mayor of Lennik.

The digitalization project is part of the Flemish subsidy call ‘Municipality without a Town Hall’. With these financial resources, Lennik and the partners digitized a cumbersome, time-intensive and expensive process. Now almost all of Flemish Brabant compiles the counting and polling stations digitally.

In order not to exclude anyone, there is a good interaction between digital working and analog working. As a citizen, do you not respond to your report in My Citizen Profile or e-box? Then after a while you will receive a physical letter and the process will continue physically. Do you want to return to the digital track afterwards? This can be done by scanning a QR code. Every citizen can choose to go from analog to digital or vice versa, depending on their preference.

​Flemish boost

​Flanders considers this an important exemplary project. That is why it gives a boost to the digitization of the composition of the counting and polling stations through the ‘Local Digital’ programme. With this, Flanders wants to ensure that even more municipalities use the solution and at the same time investigate whether there are other applications that benefit citizens.

“Almost the entire province will use this solution and Flanders will probably follow. This is a strong example of collaboration between higher authorities, local authorities and the supplier,” concludes Ann Schevenels, deputy for computer science.

The Digitalisation of counting and polling stations project was made possible thanks to subsidies from Municipality without a Town Hall, a project of Vlaamse Resilience, the recovery policy of the Flemish Government that was financed by the European Union via NextGenerationEU.

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