At last weekend’s dinner party, having just gotten back to the U.S. from France a few hours earlier, one of my friends asked me whether I thought the French election process was fair.
Some in my circle of friends still harbor resentment over the 2020 election cycle, and since the word “fair” can be somewhat loaded, I answered her question in terms of the relative transparency of the French and U.S. systems. In my opinion, transparency leads to greater confidence in an electoral outcome, even if it doesn’t necessarily change it.
First, there’s the question of who can vote in the election. In France, you have to present an electoral card to vote. It’s a photo identification card that can be used for some other purposes but must be presented to vote.
In the United States, depending on what state you’re in and who’s working the polling station, you can vote with a driver’s license, a passport, a Social Security card, a Costco card, the sample ID that came inside your wallet, or a pinky swear.
Transparency winner: France, by a furlong.
Second, there’s the question of when and where you can vote. In France, you vote in person, during the hours prescribed by law, on the day of the election, at the voting station assigned to you. If you can’t be present at the polling station on election day, you may, up to several days before the election, designate someone else to vote for you. To do this, you have to present yourself at a police station with your electoral card and a completed form, which the police will witness for you. If you are physically incapable of coming to a police station, you can request that they come to you. The person you designate, except in a few limited circumstances, cannot be the proxy voter of more than one person. The designation is only valid for one election.
Harvesting ballots by intimidation isn’t a thing. Judges ordering certain polling stations to remain open while activists round up more voters isn’t a thing. Dead or mentally incapacitated people voting by mail isn’t a thing.
Transparency winner: France, by a mile.
Finally, there’s the question of the voting process itself. In France, you enter the polling station and choose two or more sheets of paper, one designating the candidate you’re voting for, and at least one other. You go into a booth, place one of those sheets into the provided envelope, and discard the others, so that your vote is secret. You leave the booth, and your envelope is dropped into what they call an “urn,” which is made of clear, transparent material, so that everyone can see the vote being cast.
At this point, the friend who originally asked the question interrupted me and said, “And so that you know the box wasn’t pre-stuffed with ballots for one candidate.” I honestly hadn’t even considered that, but yes.
Anyway, everyone sees the votes going into the clear box, that, as my friend pointed out, started the day empty, and everyone sees the votes coming out of the box when they’re being counted. There’s no concern about a paper trail because the process is entirely on paper. There’s no question about who someone voted for because each candidate has his own sheet of paper. There’s no dimpled chads, there’s no misleading touch screens, and the only spoiled ballot would be if someone put zero or more than one sheet of paper in his envelope.
Transparency winner: France, because the other horse never left the gate.
In the end, my friend seemed satisfied, and somewhat pleasantly surprised, by my long-winded answer.
I’ll be at Sunday Mass when the results from today’s first-round French legislative elections are released, but I’ll certainly catch up later in the day. I don’t think these elections are going to have a meaningful impact on our real estate investment in France. I’m more interested out of cultural curiosity than anything else.
At some point over the next few days and weeks, I predict someone in the U.S. media will pose the question of why we don’t have election results as quickly as countries like France. The answer seems transparent to me: We’ll never get to that point as long as we have a majority of the political class hellbent on making the process ever more opaque.
(Note: I learned much of this stuff decades ago, and I’m writing this from memory, so some minor details may have changed. However, based on what I’ve read in the French media and what I’ve seen on the street, it still rings true. If you’re using any of this information for a research project, I have to ask: How did you find this blog?)
