The Belgian Ministry of Internal Affairs took advantage of the acrimonious national elections at the end of last month to try out two different electronic voting systems, one in Flanders and one in Wallonia: Waarschoot, Ghent used a system developed by the Dutch company Nedap BV which had already been used for the elections in the Netherlands, and in Verlaine, a new system jointly developed by Devlonics SA, Philips Electronics NV and Stesud SA was used – now the Walloons are making up jokes about how the Flems thought the voting systems were fruit machines, and the compliment is being returned in the other direction that the impecunious Walloons will now expect Flanders to pay for their voting machines and beggars should stick to pencil and paper – a microcosm, in other words, of what the so-called united Europe will be like.
