Articles
Author: Lieven De Winter
In the official statistics, the total number of nonvoters in the post-war parliamentary elections in Belgium, is considerably over-estimated. This is caused by the method of updating the lists of voters, so that many (sometimes a majority of) people who appear as nonvoters, are regular voters who died after the moment of updating, but were not dropped
from the lists. In this article, we endeavoured to calculate the number of deceased voters, who still appear on the lists, using the monthly death-rates of the total Belgian population, abstracting the deceased persons under age and the deceased foreigners. The more realistic rates of nonvoting, calculated this way, are quite lower than the official rates.
Yet, because of the introduction of a new method of updating, the problem discussed above, hardly exists any langer since the general election of 1977.
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How to Cite: De Winter, L. (1978) “Officiële en reële omvang van het absenteïsme bij de na-oorlogse parlementsverkiezingen”, Res Publica. 20(4). doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/rp.v20i4.19439