Belgium is headed for a triple election with voters casting ballots for a new federal parliament, regional parliaments, and members of the European Parliament all on the same day.
ADVERTISEMENTMillions of paper election ballots are currently being packed and dispatched throughout Belgium in preparation for the forthcoming European elections and Belgium's parliamentary elections, scheduled for June 9th.
The Inni Group is responsible for printing and preparing about 8 million ballots for the elections. The group also supplies voting cabins and other election materials.
“We hope that it will always be paper ballots or even more in the future. We saw the example of the Netherlands, where they came back to paper voting. I think in Wallonia they also returned back to paper because many of the people are quite afraid of the digital way," said the managing director of the Inni Group, Tom Deschildre.
"There's also the pricing issue, which working with the paper is cheaper than the digital way to do this,” he added.
Around 400 million European Union citizens go to the polls next month to elect members of the European Parliament, or MEPs, in one of the biggest global democratic events.
“We have three million voting invitations, those small cards people will receive at home. We produce about 8 million ballots. Additionally, we've prepared over 2,000 voting booths and an equal number of ballot boxes. Managing such vast quantities is a significant task. We gather them here and then distribute them in small, manageable quantities,” explained Deschildre.
Flemish nationalists are predicted to win what the country is calling the “mother of all elections.”
In Wallonia, the French-speaking southern half of the country, social democrats and the far-left have dominated the campaign.