The voters who vote white in the presidential election are “mostly on the left” and are “really interested in political life”, assures Aurélia Troupel, specialist in the white vote and lecturer at the University of Political Sciences of Montpellier, this Friday on franceinfo. She has been conducting a study on voter behavior since March 29. More than 540,000 French people voted blank in the first round on April 10.
franceinfo: Who are the voters who vote blank or null?
Aurelia Troupel: These are voters who one might think of as being paradoxical when in reality they are voters who go to the polling station to slip an envelope into the ballot box knowing full well that it will not be not taken into account. They are aware of the fact that their ballot will not be heard. What emerges from the study that I am currently conducting is that, really, these voters want to participate in the electoral act. For them, it remains an important element and they have things to say. This blank vote, precisely, is supposed to embody and carry this discontent which is theirs. The context of this year means that for the moment the “white voters” are mainly on the left. We will find an electorate that is more urban, highly educated or, if the voters are not highly educated, they will really know politics very well. When I talk to them, they have proposals for reforming the electoral system, proposals for alternatives, so these are voters who are really interested in political life and who use the blank ballot to send a message because in any case, they hope that it will be reformed.
What is wrong with them in the current system?
It is both the presidential offer and the way this election is going, it is the hyper-presidentialization, the omnipresence and the omnipotence of the president. It was, for example, voters who told me that they were going to vote in the legislative elections. So it’s either the electoral system as such, or the offer, that is to say the programmatic offer. They thoroughly scrutinized the programs of the different candidates and they find that there is really too great a gap between their concerns, which seem to them particularly essential, and the responses proposed by the different candidates.
The number of blank or invalid ballots traditionally increases in the second round of the presidential election. What number can they reach this Sunday?
In the first round this year, we had 800,000 blank ballots and invalid ballots. In the second round, it would not be surprising if they exceeded 1.5 or 2 million. In any case, this is what happened during the last presidential elections, knowing that in 2017, we even reached the record figure of 4 million in the second round.
These votes are counted but are not considered as votes cast. Should we consider changing this rule?
What is certain is that there is enormous frustration generated by this pseudo-recognition of the blank vote. Indeed, it is counted separately, but it has no impact on the calculation of the score of the other candidates. So there is a form of incomprehension on the part of most voters, whether or not they vote blank, because they do not necessarily see the usefulness of a blank vote if it has no impact. What also emerges from the interviews that I am currently conducting is that if this were taken into account, if it had a real impact on the scores, it would probably be much more numerous, much stronger.