Tribune. France is one of the last major Western democracies, along with the United States, to continue to impose on citizens an administrative procedure prior to exercising the right to vote: registration on the electoral lists of the municipality of residence , which generates the assignment to the office closest to home. Only young people, the year of their majority, and French people who have just been naturalized benefit from automatic registration. But they immediately switch to common law and must then, like the rest of the population, change their registration each time they move to be able to continue to vote near their homes.
Many of them forget to do so, through ignorance, misunderstanding, negligence, procrastination. They are then in a situation of “mis-registration”, which requires them, if they want to vote on D-Day, to travel to their former municipality, failing to have established a power of attorney a few days earlier.
In a society marked by residential mobility, where a third of registered voters move over the course of a five-year term, and while postal voting is only authorized for French people living abroad and prisoners, this electoral procedure t another time is proving to be particularly constraining, keeping millions of citizens away from the ballot box each year.
“When we understand that a quarter of French people were not registered or incorrectly registered in 2017, we can better measure the democratic challenge represented by the registration calendar”
In 2017, 5.2 million people of age and eligible to vote were thus prevented from doing so because they were not registered on the electoral lists. An even more impressive number – 7.6 million – were not registered in their commune of residence. These “poorly registered” were 2.5 times more likely to be constant abstainers, and therefore not to vote in any of the four rounds of the presidential and legislative elections. Thanks to the data provided by INSEE, we were able to establish that the situation of poor registration was the most decisive factor in abstention, playing an even greater role than age, level of diploma or social class. Conversely, when they are well registered, the French continue to vote massively: 89% of them voted in at least one of the four rounds of voting in spring 2017.
The least educated and the least well-off
We now know that the registration stage contributes to fueling very strong social inequalities in electoral participation which only worsen from one election to the next. Non-registration particularly affects the categories furthest from politics: the least educated and the most economically fragile.
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