Giving St. Maarten students in the Netherlands the opportunity to participate in elections on the island seems at first glance like a good move. To be sure, involving scholars who probably one day will
constitute much of the country’s future leadership in its governing from now makes all the sense in the world.
The youngsters in question are forced to register in the Dutch cities where they study and therefore must take their names out of the local civil registry first, while that is not the case for those who continue their education in the region. The latter group thus is able to return home and vote, while those in the European part of the kingdom aren’t.
This has created a discrepancy that might not be illegal, but perhaps undesirable. It’s a public secret that airline tickets were given out by politicians in the recent past to bring persons who are still on the voters list and staying elsewhere back home to support certain parties and/or individual candidates at the polls.
Allowing electronic voting for students abroad has been suggested to prevent these kinds of unsavoury practices and because the airfare from the Netherlands is pretty steep, so that only those who can afford it would be able to make use of this option. Whether arranging that is feasible in time for the September 26 parliamentary election remains very much to be seen, although placing ballot boxes in major Dutch cities was mentioned as an alternative.
One also should define exactly what a “St. Maarten student” is, in the sense that some people go to school in the Netherlands on their own and may not be known as such. Others probably work, and study only part-time, so this too needs to be clarified.
Computerised voting presumably during the same hours as done locally also could prove hard to integrate into the current system using pencil and paper ballots. At the very least, having to process the data brings the risk of delaying results on election night even more.
All in all, there are several potential pitfalls to reckon with, which could make the idea difficult to execute responsibly in the remaining period. One also must be wary of creating over-expectation among the students that later proves impossible to meet.
