Voting guide data leak shows PVV, labour party most recommended
A data leak from Dutch voting guide Stemwijzer, the only one online as yet, revealed which parties are most often recommended to people. After answering 30 questions, most people got the PVV recommended to them, followed by the PvdA. GeenPeil and Forum voor Democratie are at the bottom of the list.
Security researcher Loran Kloeze discovered the leak, according to AD. People using the Chrome browser could call up the statistics. In Stemwijzer's code Kloeze discovered the "signature" SijmenRuwhofiseenlul, which translates to "Sijmen Ruwhof is a dick". Ruwhof is a cyber security expert who pointed out vulnerabilities in the country's election software and in the Dutch political parties' websites last week. His criticism is partly responsible for Interior Minister Ronald Plasterk's decision to count the ballots in the parliamentary elections by hand in March.
Anita de Jong of website maker ProDemos told the newspaper that the leak is now closed. "It is true that the information could be fairly easily seen by everybody. That's because we ourselves want to keep track of how often people use Stemwijzer." she said to AD. ProDemos closed the counter because it seemed that people were wrongly using the data as a kind of election result. "We think that people don't know how the estimate the value of the raw data. For example, people can complete the Stemwijzer more than once and also students too young to vote do the test at school. The information is not complete."
De Jong called the incident a learning experience.
