Ah end of another working day. I thought I'd amuse myself with wrting down how we in Belgium hold _proper_ *cough* elections.

You see, Belgium is this very small country with a little over 10million inhabitants. 6 million or so speak Dutch, the other [retarded] southern part speaks french. Every four years, we elect a federal government. It seems this country has a proper democracy, since we are allowed to vote for more than two parties/people (for you Nader fans : don't kid yourselves). But what about the power of the individual states (Flemish, French and some little German part we seem to have gotten after the war) ? Easy. A seperate government for those ! This wouldn't be so bad if we didn't also have governments for the different regions (geographically this time).

So, in short, I would have to vote for: federal, flemish 'state', flemish 'region' and of course the European elections. On top of this we also have to elect a town council and if you live in a big city like Antwerp also a board that does social-security stuff.

Confused yet ? only 10 million people, but 5 governments, town councils/mayor elections, european elections. All counted by the amount of votes, not some weird high-score list per states or whatever.
How on earth do we count it all ? No belgian in his right mind wants to go counting weirdass ballots with punch-through holes and what not, so we just vote by computer. No, not from home, just a computer with a light-pen in the little booth.