Some porous protesters in the thesis of a rigged election emerged from failure to the law in some offices. Real failures, but in the state, and until proven otherwise, anecdotal.
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The promoter of the referendum of citizens’ initiative, Etienne Chouard, the former editorialist of the Russian state chain RT France, Alexis Poulin, the conspiracy influencer sylvano trota … many challenging figures note that some polling stations, would have refused to display the voting results. An electoral offense, argue, even a start of fraud.
“We have just been informed of a certain source, that the voting offices of the city of Pau will not affect the results after proclamation. Only the centralizing offices will do so, it is a violation of the Article R67 of the Electoral Code “, Written so WithNous2022, in a tweet that moved massively on April 10th.
This small account is linked to one of the different associations that have created in recent weeks to monitor the proper functioning of the electoral process, often with the charge “Trumpiste” of massive fraud and trucked election in 2020. What about these allegations really?
The results are well supposed to be displayed
Contact by Le Monde, Jean-Pierre Camby, Associate Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Versailles-Saint Quentin and author of the Constitutional Council, Electoral Judge (Dalloz “Studies”, 2017), confirms that the Article R67 of the Electoral Code imposes in theory the display of results for each polling station.
“Immediately after the end of the counting, the minutes of the electoral operations is written by the secretary in the voting room, in the presence of the voters. (…) From the establishment of the minutes, the result is proclaimed In public by the president of the polling station and posted in full by his care in the voting room, “says the electoral code.
“If a mayor does not proclaim the result, it is a formal irregularity,” summarizes Mr. Camby.
The absence of display, alone, does not constitute a fraud
But, is it, in fact, this type of breach is frequent, and “in itself does not display the result is not in itself reprehensible”. It must be associated with other formal irregularities, as a gap between the number of votes and the number of bulk, or calculation errors, to constitute a beginning of suspicion of electoral fraud. Then charge the electoral judge to invalidate or not the results. However, it is not always the case: “For the last municipal, we did not cancel where it was to”, regret the lawyer, in a context of pandemic who had a strong impact on the smooth running of the ballot.
If there is frequent results with slight irregularities are validated, the Council of State, if it is seized by voters, can cancel a local result, which is relatively frequent. “With the law of large numbers, it will not change the final result,” M. Camby.