A few days after the second round of the legislative elections, the 5th graders of Les Bruyères college in Courbevoie, in the Hauts-de-Seine, have questions about the course and the consequences of this election. They wonder about the risk of fraud in the cities where it was possible to vote electronically, but also about the problem of abstention and about the future of the ministers who presented themselves in the legislative elections and who lost.
Yankel has seen videos on Facebook and TikTok of people questioning the safety of electronic voting and she wonders “if it is true that there are risks of electoral fraud with voting machines.”
Voting machines were introduced in France in 2002. The purpose of these machines was precisely to limit any risk of error and fraud, since there is no manual counting step, where Every vote and every ballot counts. Despite everything, from the outset, there were opponents to this way of voting, because these machines are expensive, because there had been technical problems, because the fact of not being able to be sure, in time real, that the machine recorded the right vote or not being able to recount the ballots sometimes led to a certain mistrust among voters or candidates.
In this context of doubts, a moratorium was put in place in 2008. Since then, some municipalities have continued to use them, but elected officials are asking to be released from the moratorium in order to be able to easily renew the machines.
Judith noticed that in the second round of legislative abstention was still very strong, “nearly 54% of voters did not come to vote“and she wonders if”we could not force voters to vote as is done in other countries or is there no other way to vote“.
In 2020, after the last municipal elections, parliamentarians had considered the possibility of setting up postal voting for the upcoming elections. They suggested experimenting with it for local consultations, thinking about ways to set up secure internet voting to extend it one day beyond French people abroad, for whom it is already in place.
The possibility of making voting compulsory also regularly gives rise to political debates, as well as to legislative proposals, but which have not been adopted so far. On the other hand, Judith is right, this system of compulsory voting does exist in several countries in Europe.
Aure saw on the franceinfo site that the ministers defeated in the elections had to resign. So she wondersif there is a written rule or law” and what would happen” if a defeated minister remained in office“.
Aure is right, three ministers, beaten in the second round of the legislative elections, will have to resign. There is no rule or law that imposes it, but it has been like that, systematically, since the legislative elections of 2007. The Prime Minister at the time, François Fillon, said he found “logical that when you are defeated in the elections, you don’t stay in government because that means you don’t have the support of the people”. For example, Alain Juppé, then Minister of Ecology, had been beaten in the legislative elections in Bordeaux and had to resign.
If a defeated minister remained in office, it would not be against the law, but it could be frowned upon since all the other ministers in the same case in recent years have left their post.