Can you guess what this is? Every adult in our household got one of these in the mail recently. It's a fancier-looking document than our Iowa marriage licence. But it isn't for anything nearly as permanent. It's a stempas. Still puzzled?

Pas = pass.
That's not so mysterious.
But the word stem is a "false friend." It has nothing to do with flower stalks or origins. It means "voice" and also "vote." We each received a pass to vote in local elections. The pass indicated which elections we could vote in and included a letter explaining these. I could only vote for members of the local water management board. (Water management is a big thing in the Netherlands.) Ellen, who has Dutch citizenship, could also vote for members of the provincial parliament.

Since I was not really up-to-date on the election for the water management board, I went to the Stemwijzer (wijzer = pointer or index) online. The stemwijzer listed the major issues in the election. I could indicate my standpoint on those issues. Then the stemwijzer program compared my point of view with that of the parties running in the election. This helped me make an informed choice.

The parliamentary system is different from the system we have in the U.S.A.  Here, representatives and board members are democratically elected, but the seats in parliament (or on the board) are divided up by the number of votes each party receives. If there were 100 seats up for re-election, and the Party for the Preservation of Purple Hats in Gelderland (yes, I'm making this up) got 2% of the total votes, then they would send two representatives to the provincial parliament in Gelderland. 

The parties list candidates for office. A voter can vote for candidates within the party. So if candidate #5 on the list of the Party for the Preservation of Purple Hats got more votes than candidate #1 or #2, then #5 would be one of the two Purple Hats going to the provincial parliament instead of #2. Otherwise, the top two on the Purple Hats' list would go.

Think about the implications of this system. Parties tend to focus on their point of view for the major issues rather than the personalities of the candidates. Because only a small percentage of the total vote is needed to win a seat, new parties or fringe parties can actually get someone. So there are a lot of different parties. The stemwijzer for Gelderland lists 15 parties that participate in the stemwijzer. These include  "Party for the Animals," "50+," and "Jesus Lives." Another result of this system is that to get a majority in parliament--and get anything done--parties usually need to make coalitions with each other. Sometimes this results in very strange bedfellows such as the Christian Union and the party whose leader is so rabidly and publicly racist that Britain will no longer allow him to visit.

On March 20, Ellen and I each took our fancy stem pas and our Dutch ID's to the closest polling place. We marked our paper ballots with the red pencils in the voting booths and dropped them into the locked ballot boxes. The results for the provincial parliament were not known until yesterday, March 26. The water board didn't take that long to sort out. Their results are already available, maybe because only 11 parties ran in that election. How did I vote? According to my Kingdom-based principles, as I always do.