The European elections will take place in France on Sunday June 9 and a decree has already provided for new arrangements intended to facilitate voting.
Change for the European elections. The French will be called to vote to elect their political representatives to the European Parliament on Sunday June 9, but the vote may not be a great success. The previous European elections had difficulty mobilizing half of the citizens: 42.43% participation in 2014 and 50.12% in 2019. This year, the vote could be more successful, particularly given the significant issues at stake both for the presidential majority which fears seeing its forces reduced in Strasbourg than for the National Rally which has been at the top of the voting intentions for several months. Some new features regarding voting methods could also encourage more voters to participate in the ballot.
A decree published in the Official Journal at the end of December facilitates the necessary procedure for making a proxy for voters absent on polling day. Citizens will be able to use a “tele-procedure”, as is already the case for all elections, but they will no longer have to go to a police station or gendarmerie to have their identity verified and the power of attorney validated. The entire procedure will be carried out online and the identity of voters will be verified “using a means of electronic identification presumed to be reliable and certified”. This means of identification could be the public digital identity service France Identity. As a reminder, a proxy can be given to a person registered on the electoral list of another municipality, but on election day the vote of the principal can only be validated in his polling station and not that of the person responsible for voting. proxy.
Another change planned for the European elections: ballots printed by voters currently considered invalid can be counted. Some conditions must, however, be respected for the ballot to be taken into account: it must be printed “in black and white on white paper from the models produced by the candidates” and it must be free of any handwritten inscription. These changes to the voting methods are currently only valid for the 2024 European elections, specifies the decree.