As France figures out how to hold safe elections amid a public health crisis, the U.S. uu. the experience with mass voter turnout by mail offers lessons for the country’s political class: they just can’t agree on what they are.
mail-in voting was banned in france in 1975 over fears of electoral fraud, but record turnout in the us. uu. The general election has reignited the debate over postal voting. But even within President Emmanuel Macron’s own party, there are differing views on whether expanding voter turnout through postal ballots is a good idea.
The government is already proposing to delay its regional and departmental elections from March to June 2021, as it seeks to avoid a repeat of this year’s interrupted municipal elections. In June, the Modem Centrist Party, an ally of President Emmanuel Macron’s LREM, proposed a law to introduce postal voting to facilitate voting during the public health crisis caused by the coronavirus.
The US election was just what they needed to catapult the issue into the mainstream, but government ministers remain skeptical.
“Let me believe, without any judgment on the American polls…that the French electoral system works well,” interior minister gerald darmanin, whose responsibilities include organizing elections, told the national assembly on 10 november. For Darmanin, voting booths are the guarantee that no other person can “influence the voter’s choice: a husband over his wife or, conversely, a father over his son, etc.”
france allows proxy voting, which poses similar risks of pressure from family members. it also allows postal voting in very limited circumstances, especially during legislative and consular elections for French citizens abroad. but in this case there is a relatively high level of rejected ballots (20 to 25 percent), suggesting that voters are not always sure how to mark their ballot correctly.
However, unlike the United States, there is no clear political fault line on voting by mail, and most opposition parties do not have an agreed position. among the center-right réublicains, for example, the president of Île-de-france, valérie pécresse, is “totally hostile” to voting by mail, while the president of the senate, gérard larcher, says that it should “work on it.”
Leading the national far-right rally,
marine le pen, the only french party yet to recognize joe biden’s victory, is implacably opposed to mail-in ballots. she tweeted last week that the 1975 ban should be upheld because the ease with which voter fraud can be perpetrated is “well known.”
darmanin reiterated his own opposition in a tweet on Sunday, casting the idea as the latest American fad. “I wonder about the will to Americanize our institutional system, as if we always had to copy the other side of the Atlantic without defending French specificities,” he said. meanwhile, le journal du dimanche reported that macron himself “was not closed to this option.”
“It’s definitely not about Americanizing the French system,” said Roland Lescure, an lrem member of parliament representing French citizens living in North America, “but about having a French experiment that takes into account what works and what doesn’t. not abroad.”
Ballots by mail are popular in other European countries. More than 13 million German voters cast their ballots in the 2017 general election, representing 29 percent of the electorate. in the United Kingdom. general election that same year, nearly 7 million voted by mail, accounting for 22 percent of the total votes cast. and the Netherlands has just allowed its senior citizens to vote by mail in its next general election in March 2021, so vulnerable people don’t have to go to crowded polling stations.
However, Darmanin has an ally in his battle for French electoral traditions: Prime Minister Jean Castex.
in a report commissioned by castex to request solutions for the conduct of safe regional elections, the former president of the constitutional council jean-louis debré suggested studying “the development of voting by mail or internet in conditions that ensure the sincerity of the vote. ”
but the prime minister’s office was quick to reiterate darmanin’s objections and identified other “technical difficulties” with mail-in ballots. it cited an estimated cost of €70 million to €90 million and stated that the need to go through a post office does not give voting in person a comparative advantage in terms of social distancing. Castex’s team argues that France’s two-round electoral system, with just two weeks between voting days, could also turn postal voting into a logistical nightmare.