Online voting in 2025: what changed and what's coming
2025 was a pivotal year for professional online voting in Belgium. No big national election, but a long run of company, professional-body and federation ballots — and, in the background, the countdown starting toward the social elections of May 2028. Here is what we take away from the year, plainly.
What we ran in 2025
The year confirmed a trend: professional organisations are moving to online voting for their statutory elections, not just large companies.
- In March 2025, we supported the Compsy elections — the Assembly of Representatives and the Board — entirely online. A statutory ballot, with several bodies to elect, run without a physical polling station.
- Throughout the year, multilingual elections came up in almost every project. In a country where one company asks Dutch-, French- and German-speaking colleagues to vote, a ballot is not "translated": it exists natively in each language, or turnout drops.
The field lesson of 2025 is less technical than people assume: what makes an online election succeed is preparation and communication, not the platform alone.
What did not change — and that is on purpose
In a sector fond of announcing "disruption", it has to be said clearly: the fundamentals of a legitimate election did not move, and must not move.
- Ballot secrecy stays non-negotiable: by design, no link between a voter's identity and their choice.
- Verifiability stays the criterion that separates a real election from an online poll: every voter must be able to confirm their vote was counted, without revealing what they voted.
- GDPR still treats the electoral roll as personal data, with hosting, retention period and deletion all to be justified.
The useful innovation in 2025 was not reinventing these principles, but making them simpler to live with for both the voter and the organiser.
What's coming: the 2028 countdown
The event that shapes the next two years is known: the 2028 social elections. They will run within a two-week window in May 2028, but the legal procedure starts well before — in late 2027, on day X-60, around December 2027.
In practice, that means 2026 and 2027 are not years of waiting:
- 2026 is the year of budget and reflection: should you move to electronic voting, for which colleges, at what cost?
- 2027 is the year of decisions: choosing the provider, getting the works council or CPPW to agree on online voting, running a tender where required.
- Late 2027 – May 2028 is the year of execution.
The organisations that will go into 2028 calmly are the ones that started thinking about it in 2026.
In short
2025 confirmed that online voting has become a normal tool for Belgian professional elections — provided nothing is given up on secrecy, verifiability and data protection. And above all, 2025 marked the start of a countdown: May 2028 is prepared from now on.
Want to make 2026 a useful year for your 2028 elections? Let's talk: we help organisations lay the right groundwork — budget, colleges, timeline — well before the procedure starts.
