By
AMSTERDAM — The authenticity of more than 400,000
signatures gathered by activists in the Netherlands to trigger last year's
referendum on the European Union treaty with Ukraine was never verified, it
emerged on Thursday.
The information came in a letter from the Internal
Affairs Ministry, responding to a Freedom of Information Act request, published
by broadcaster RTL.
A spokeswoman for the country's Electoral Council
confirmed to Reuters that a sampling of names had been checked to verify they
were those of registered voters, but not whether the signatures themselves were
real.
"The Dutch referendum law does not require the
signatures to be verified," said Heleen Hörmann.
"When we evaluated the law we raised concerns ...
about the process. There is no way for the signatures to be verified because
they were never entered in the system."
The council had recommended that the government use
its national digital identification system, known by the acronym DigiD, for the
referendum application, but that advice was not adopted, she said.
The nonbinding Ukraine
referendum was the first in the Netherlands put forward by citizens under a law
that went into effect in July 2015 and is up for review this year.
Dutch voters overwhelmingly rejected the EU-Ukraine
association treaty, which was strongly opposed by Russia, in the plebiscite
last April.
The result forced Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte to
seek a compromise deal with 27 other EU member states that eventually saved the
agreement.
Intelligence agencies have warned that elections this
year in the Netherlands, France and Germany could be vulnerable to manipulation
by outside actors, including Russia.
The Dutch government last week ordered ballots in the
March 15 parliamentary vote to be hand-counted and said the software previously
used to aggregate local votes nationally must not be used.
Interior Minister Ronald Plasterk said the measures
were needed to avoid the risk of manipulation.
(Editing
by Andrew Roche)
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