What Does France Know About Elections That We Don’t?

The final results of some races will not be known until weeks later.

Would you not like a better way to do things?

France is home to approximately 50 million voters. Absentee voting is not possible. Proxy voting allows one French voter, however, to vote for another. This voting must be done in person.

You can count paper ballots as soon as they close.

Associated Press:

In 1975, fraud fears made mail-in voting illegal.

Machine voting was allowed as an experiment in 2002. However, security concerns have halted the purchase of new machines since 2008. A handful of towns still use them.

A centrist Macron government tried to pass an amendment to allow machine voting in order to allow electoral participation in the COVID-19 Pandemic. However, the Senate was led by a conservative majority and rejected the measure as it was not legal enough.

What’s the secret that France knows we don’t know?

France is the Gold Standard for democracy for the left. It’s easy to vote.

Voters place their ballots inside a booth, with the curtains drawn. They then place their ballots in a booth with the curtains closed.

Volunteers count the ballots one by one. Officials will then use state-run software to register and report results.

Only paper ballots are legal. A dispute can be resolved manually.

There are many methods to “suppress” your vote, do you think?

According to Poynter.com, the results were transmitted at each station within one to two hours of closing time. The results were then sent to the Ministry of Interior, which published them in real-time.

It’s done. You can’t mess with the totals. The wait is short, making cheating nearly impossible.

It does not reduce the importance and power of election officials. Maybe because it makes cheating more difficult, that is why it isn’t used here in the U.S.

While we are moving towards paper ballots, there is still much to do with absentee, mail-in, and early voting before we can reach the simplicity of France’s system.