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Greetings, citizens of Netherlands,

as mentioned in my previous article, Netherlands has been experiencing referendum after a long period of time. Referendum about referendum, to be more precise. One of the things I have been trying to prove during this time, was the fact, that current Dutch referendum rules are broken, and therefore the institution of referendums does not make much sense. Up until now, I have only been able to make theoretical statements. However, with the end of referendum, I am now able to present actual evidence to either confirm, or deny my theoretical claims from previous article.



So, let's start with basics: The necessary quorum for successful referendum was 35% of our citizens, that is 65 citizens. Impossible to get, however since people claimed in debates lowering quorum to 25% or 20% should be more than enough, I expected to see atleast 35 or 40 people to vote.

At the moment of referendum, we had 28 Congress Members (and 1 President able to vote in Congress as well). 22 of these members have voted in proposal to allow referendum. 18 supported it, 3 were against, one neutral.



And now for referendum itself. How many people actually voted?


Yeah - we have more Congress members, than people actually voting in the referendum. Which is a sad conclusion. If we look at the turnout, the turnout is:


So even lowering quorum to 15% would not be enough for referendum to pass. Also a surprising discovery.

HOWEVER! There are actually two positive things to mention (and only two positive things on my mind, to be honest). First of all - out of these 24 people, 37,5% were not holding any political position (= were not in Congress or government). So the referendum actually attracted normal citizens, who are not currently active in political arena. That is good.

Second positive thing: According to "VN metric", the reached turnout was actually 50,7%. What is "VN metric"? Well, to quote its author Weekstrom:


So, if quorum was defined this way, it could be set up to 50% with no problem, as we would be able to achieve the quorum easily. Certainly sounds better than setting it to 10% according to current rules, right?



The second issue is the length of referendum. There is voting period of 72 hours, which I believed to be excessive. And I was indeed correct. Out of all voters, 80% voted during first 24 hours and 92% during the first 48 hours. So why is the period so long? To have time to revive frozen accounts to tip the balance of referendum in your favor? That is the only reason I can find. 48 hours should work just fine, even RL elections and referendums are not THAT long.



In terms of other problems I theoretically defined (the participation of multi accounts or foreign influences): thankfully, none of these seemed to happen - however just as in real-life, where children cannot vote until reaching certain age, we should implement similar rules for our newborn citizens. Even people, who are here for years, have trouble understanding our society, our laws, our customs or basic game rules. So let's prevent uninformed newborns to weigh strong influence over important topics.

Speaking about important topics - referendums should only be made for important topics. Else referendums can be used for any debate as pure stalling tactic. I mean - this referendum took week to administer, and I believe Chairman of Congress was as fast as possible while preparing it. It could take much longer.



Also, a topic of promotion of referendum has been brought up during the debate. How to administer referendum to all citizens? One way, that was suggested, was PMs to individual citizens... but imagine doing that in nations with even our size - 185 citizens. It would be Herculean task to do so. Instead, heavy promotion on national feed by Congress officials, and responsibility of party presidents to inform their party members about ongoing referendum to promote their political agenda, should be the main way of distributing the referendum.



In the end, as I talked about parties - let's see, how many people participated from each party. One other trend to mention - only members of TOP5 political parties voted. None of the politically non-affiliated citizens managed to participate in referendum. Which is also another discovery to remind ourselves. Either way, let's see the parties:


Certainly something to think about for some Party Presidents 😉 .



And that is all. Atleast for now. I am sure the referendum debates will continue, as another proposal has been opened minutes after the referendum ended. And somehow, I feel it will not be enough to solve all the issues discovered, and more debates will have to happen. If the referendum will still be considered as worthwhile option, of course. Anything is possible at the moment.