How France is Able to Count Votes So Fast

France is holding a run-off presidential election on Sunday, April 24. Each polling place has approximately 1,000 registered voters. During the day, poll workers at each polling place take note when 100 ballots have been cast. At that point the ballots are retrieved and sent to the counting station. This is repeated, each time another 100 ballots have been cast. Therefore, because the bulk of the counting is done during the day, the votes will have been counted within an hour and thirty minutes of the closing of the polls.

In the U.S., in which almost all public elections are on Tuesday, there is a glut of voters in the evening, because many people work on Tuesday during the normal business hours and then vote when they leave work in the evening. But in France, and many other countries, the flow of voters to the polling station is more evenly-spaced, because most people don’t work on Sundays.

France has no postal ballots, but France allows proxy voting. French citizens living in possessions of France have the same voting rights and the same procedures for in-person voting. French citizens living overseas, in parts of the world that are not French possessions, vote at French government offices such as consulates. See this article for more about proxy voting.


Comments

How France is Able to Count Votes So Fast — 24 Comments

  1. Pete … it’s simple. Sunday voting would speed up US voting too. And, with that, by not having lines waiting to vote 3 hours after the cutoff, improve ballot access. #fify

  2. Why would we want to speed up voting? So lazy people can vote even more easily and elect even more communists to hand out even more stolen money? No thanks. Keep voting on Tuesdays and make it in person only with current state drivers license. If people can’t wait in line for just one day to vote, there’s no reason they should be allowed to vote at all.

  3. How many regime changes in France since 1789 ???

    Condorcet – French – had head chopped off by morons in 1789 revolution.

  4. Sadly, it looks like macaron gets another term, unless it’s fake news. Probably a stolen election.

  5. We in tbe USA should do something like this. Move elections to the weekend, and use all paper ballots, hand counted, in full view of the public, and at each polling place.

  6. “use all paper ballots, hand counted, in full view of the public, and at each polling place.”

    Yes but keep it on Tuesday. Too many people voting is not good.

  7. Too many voters period is the far bigger problem. The eligibility test for voting must be made a lot tougher. Go back 200 years and do a reset to the criteria we had then, for starters.

  8. Macron 58 pct – Le Pen 42 pct — TV 6:30 PM news

    How many UN-stable regimes in Europe — due to FATAL defects in election systems ???

    PR
    APPV
    TOTSOP

  9. He probably cheated like sleepy Joe. Still 8 points better than last time. Next one will be a win.

  10. Or, make Election Day a holiday. Heck, make it a four day weekend;make Monday a holiday too.

    BUT, get rid of early voting (should not be Election SEASON), and same day registration.

  11. Lol thats funny how a difference in time of 100s or 1000s of percentage is laid at the feet of french not working on sundays lmao!! An then they describe the voting abroad that should have significant impact on the speed.. it takes longer because they want it to.. you need time to careful adjust the outcome so that its hard to figure out. An a private company middle man is counter to the purpose of an election.. just look at the usa being caught sending the fbi to force tech and media to illegally censor things that the government wants suppressed.. not true or false.. like they say.. obviously. Voting should be tallied constantly at close intervals in the smalled local districts.. and printed for voters to take them as they vote if they want.. we need to break up the large pools and validate as it goes this will radically reduce the funny business.. but they will say its in our best interest not to.. and not go into detail exactly why.. or say something that makes no sense.. and continue to confuse and overcomplicate a simple 1+1+1 math problem.. the usa should not have these issues.. its by design folks.. look at the passed anytime it went even a fraction of these lengths something was going wrong.. or a known manipulation.. duh people dont let them pour word soup over your head and go along because your not sure of the details.. thats what they want.. you to feel insecure about calling out something that makes no sense. Thats why they started the red mirage propaganda to prepare you for a final number that looks absolutely nothing like the demographic polls that overwhelming leans one way.. you need time and careful strategies to push it back in your favor.. people forget lose interest.. have time to create a new serious issue to distract.. a million favorable reasons to drag it out.

  12. I was curious how it worked, since it always seems the United States of America is generally “slow” to count their results. If there is a recount, it feels like the numbers are always different here. I know the USA keeps their elections complicated and hard intentionally. Simply because we see (more so on the right) can say the elections are rigged and want less people to vote. Fox News has many segments on how they want less people to vote. By keeping it complex and hard, it makes it easier to push conspiracy theories.

    The USA would never move voting to a Sunday. Because “churches” are polling places for a lot of people and church is Sunday. Too many snowflakes would whine they would lose one church day. The point is to make sure less people vote. This is also on top of, too many of American jobs also have the possibility of working on a Sunday. The USA would need some kind of laws that would limit the number of jobs that could work on a Sunday. Many of our retail stores do not need to be opened for a full day.

    But I also see, in France it’s probably a lot easier to have thousands of polling places, simply because you guys don’t have as many droughts of places that could be polling stations. France has a lot of mixed zoning, so it is easy to keep a polling place around 1,000. In the USA thanks to the stupidity of suburbs, you could realistically go have to drive 10+ minutes to your nearest polling place. Even in the city, you could find the closest polling place “far” from your home. More so in minority communities, where they try to make them, all go into one place.

    I do like the ideas though of counting throughout the day and elections being a day off that MOST people have. Well I don’t fully believe you the cap per polling place is a 1,000 voters. I think it would also do the USA plenty of favors if they had hard cap limits on the amount of people that can vote at one polling place.

  13. It needs to be a holiday when no one is allowed to work, drink alcohol, eat out, etc. Voting should be the only thing to take place on voting day. No trucks delivering anything, no schools or retail open, no one answering the phone at call centers, no factories or warehouses or construction sites open for business..just voting and counting of votes.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.