Presidential 2022: how prison voting disrupted Parisian election

Centralized correspondence voting at the Ministry of Justice did more than double the number of voters of the 1st district of Paris.

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Electoral mystery, depending on the display in the town hall of the results of the first round of the presidential election or the site of the Ministry of the Interior, the 1 er arrondissement of Paris would be macronist or melenchonist. To look closer, the result of April 10 clutched in town hall announces 43.04% of the votes for the outgoing President, out of a total of 8,632 votes cast and a participation rate of 79%. The place Beauvau gives, on the other hand, the leader of France unsuitable with 34.54%, an identical participation rate, but 18,866 votes cast.

This divergence comes from the vote by correspondence by the detainees, whose newsletters have been stripped in a fictional voting office at the Ministry of Justice, Place Vendôme, and recorded with the voters of this district which goes from the place of the Concordes to the halls. The success of this method of participation in the elections, inaugurated for the Europeans of 2019 and for the first time this year for a presidential election, came to blur the results of this easy district where Mr Mélenchon arrived second (21.22%) and Eric Zemmour third (9.28 %).

The 10,234 detainees who voted by correspondence placed the same titeré in the lead as all the French, but in a different order. Jean-Luc Mélenchon Friesland the 50% with 45.78% of the votes, in front of Marine Le Pen (20.28%) and Emmanuel Macron (18.63%). The following are less well than at the national level, with Eric Zemmour at 3.82% and Valérie Pécresse at 2.61%.

13,672 detainees have taken the step

In 2018, Emmanuel Macron, in 2018, announced to facilitate access to the vote for detainees, sentenced or remand, seeing an element of their dignity to be respected. Deprived of freedom but not from their citizenship, these people are intended to reintegrate society, he argued. The ministries of justice and the interior have therefore imagined for them a third way to vote, next to the vote by proxy and the permission to go out asked the judge to fulfill his duty of citizen.

In the European elections, 5,184 detainees had registered to vote by correspondence and 413 had done so. This year, they are 13,672 to have taken the process to register in their respective prisons and, ultimately, 75 % of them slipped a bulletin for April 10. A little more, since 457 votes arrived at Place Vendôme were tried zero. This hiccup, revealed by the International Prisons Observatory (OIP), occurred in particular because some of these envelopes did not contain the necessary elements (photocopying on one side of the identity card instead of both ) when other envelopes were not sealed or partially torn. At the Ministry of Justice, it is assured that instructions have been passed in penitentiary establishments in order to limit these risks of nullity for the second round of the ballot.

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/Media reports.