# More problems with our voting-system (mainly the blank-voting part)

Hey G33ks,

So it’s no news that all Dutchies above the age of 18 are allowed to go voting for their “favourite” faction of politicians (read: professional liars).
However, I see a lot of people not voting, simply voting blank (voting blank is just submitting your vote without marking a box) or made their vote invalid (by checking multiple boxes or drawing funny stuff, which is counted the same as voting blank).
They think that by doing so they are working against the system, however, they forget a major issue (above the issue I pointed out a while ago):

When you aren’t voting, your vote goes to the biggest faction.
When you vote blank or invalid, your vote goes to “all” factions.

However, that is where the issue arises.
I don’t need to explain the issue with not going to vote at all, rather the blank-voting.
The issue can be explained with a little bit of math and logics (please bear with me, there are a lot of calculations being made to proof I’m right):

Let’s say 1,000,000 people are voting.
All these 1,000,000 people are voting on a faction.
We have 150 seats to distribute among the factions.

The sum would be like this:
$(\frac{totalvotes}{seats} = Votes needed per seat) = (\frac{1,000,000}{150} = 6,666.67) = 6,666.67$

So that would mean that for 1 seat, a faction needs 6,666.67 votes (or for simplicity 6,667 votes).
However, when 1% of the voters votes blank, the equation would change:
$(\frac{((\frac{total votes}{100}) * 99)}{seats} = Votes needed per seat) = (\frac{((\frac{1,000,000}{100}) * 99)}{150} = 6,600) = 6,600$

Thus, only 6,600 votes would be needed for 1 seat.

In 2012, 12,689,810 people where allowed to vote.
3,227,587 didn’t come, so 9,462,223 did come and vote.
9,424,235 votes where valid of which 17,004 voted blank and 20,984 votes where invalid.
This leaves us with this equation:
$(\frac{(total votes - (blank votes + invalidvotes))}{seats} = Votes needed per seat) = (\frac{(9,462,223 - (17,004 + 20,984))}{150} = Votes needed per seat) = (\frac{(9,462,223 - (37,988))}{150} = 62,828) = 62,828$

So about 62,828 votes needed per seat.
Now according to the 2012 elections kiesdeler, 1 seat was equal to 62,829 votes (I’m off by just óne single vote, which is a decent margin of error if you’d ask me).

now let’s do the same equation, but this time, we pretend that all the people who came to vote, voted on an actual faction.
Then this would become the equation:
$(\frac{totalvotes}{seats} = Votes needed per seat) = (\frac{9,462,223}{150} = 63,081.487) = 63,081.487$

So instead of 62,828 votes per seat, a faction would now need about 63,081 votes per seat (so a grand total of 253 votes per seat extra!).

Now that 253 votes extra can actually have a major impact on the outcome of the election.
This is why factions like Niet-Stemmers come into play.
I voted for them myself (and of course hope that they will get some seats!).
They promise that they will leave their seats “empty” (whether this is true won’t be known until they get seats, though, so I still remain sceptical).

This post is not intended as propaganda for them, but rather to open your mind that just thinking “Not gonna vote, I don't care about politics” can actually impact the elections a big deal.
By voting blank, you actually inflate other people their votes (and may the Lord know what jerk they voted on).

I hope this post gave you a good insight of why you should just vote (may it be on a faction like Niet-Stemmers, CDA or SP – I chose CDA and SP by random) instead of blanking or making your vote invalid.
Again, I’m not intending to make propaganda for certain factions, just vote whatever you like and however you like, it will (and I truthly hope it is) be up to you anyways.

Well, that’s it for this post!
If I somewhere along the line made a mistake in my calculations or logics, then feel free to leave a comment! (if the comment section works… it tends to break a lot…)
Don’t forget to share it around, so others can read it as well!

G33k Out!

### Comment ( 1 )

1. Fix these damn voting issues already… – FinlayDaG33k
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