The Dutch voting council is urging home affairs minister Ronald Plasterk to ban the practise of taking self-portraits in polling stations.

Taking stemfies – a combination of selfie and stemmen which means to vote – was a craze at both the European and local elections earlier this year.

The council says the practice conflicts with legislation on voter secrecy and makes the voting process open to fraud, the council says. This is because people could sell, or be forced to sell, their votes and then take a picture to prove it.

Plasterk said during the local elections on March 19 that taking photographs of yourself voting is not banned as long as the photographer does not infringe on other people’s privacy. That statement led to a court case in which judges also ruled in favour of the stemfie.

The court said that while the disadvantages of taking ballot box photos outweighed the advantages, that did not mean the practice should be banned.