Parliamentary evening, April 29, 2009, Brussels, Belgium
Between the 4th and the 7th of June 2009 375 million citizens will be called to the polls in the 27 member states to cast their vote for their representatives in the European Parliament for the next five years. Before that background in June 2008 the Federal Agency for Civic Education (BpB ) organized a NECE conference. NECE - "Networking for the European Parliament Elections 2009 " in Strasbourg under the auspices of the European Parliament with the aim to provide a platform for exchange of existing and planned models and projects for mobilising voters for the 2009 European Parliament Elections. Institutions from more than 20 European countries came together and three larger projects for the 2009 elections emerged out of their collaboration. The results will be introduced at the European parliamentary evening on the 29th April, 2009 in Brussels. In the focal point will be the launching of VoteMatch Europe 2009 as the largest project from all three. Members of the European Parliament will be invited to test the popular voting tool in the presence of media representatives. The two other projects – JuniorVoting and Grafstat - will be also present and information brochures will be made available. The event is a continuum of the preceding workshop on "Tools for Mobilisation of Voters " in Cologne, Germany, that took place from the 22-23 March, 2009.
Vote Match is one of the best established tools to measure people’s political preferences before conduction of elections. The concept has already proven its applicability at the national level with the release of voting tests in the Netherland s with StemWijzer , in Switzerland with the tri - lingual Politarena , Bulgaria with Glasovoditel and in Germany with Wahl-O-Mat . Exemplary for the popularity of the tool are the numbers of use delivered by the Wahl-O-Mat statistics: five million people have tested it during the 2005 parliamentary elections and more than ten millions have tested the tool since 2002.
For more details, please visit www.bpb.de/nece and very soon www.nece.eu