Presidential: majority judgment to fight against abstention and useful voting?

Published on: 04/18/2022 – 07:23 Experienced during the popular primary in January, the majority judgment ballot is once again being talked about during this interval between the presidential rounds. An experiment carried out by the Mieux Voter association, the CNRS and the University of Paris-Dauphine made it possible to compare the current voting method and majority judgment. With 12,824,169 registered voters having preferred abstention to any of the twelve candidates present during the first round of the presidential election, the direct uninominal majority ballot in two rounds, practiced for the French presidential election since 1965, to a new once shown its limits. Especially since we must add to these abstainers the 543,609 blank votes, the 247,151 invalid votes and the very numerous – but incalculable – useful votes. largely in the lead in the first round with 27% when Emmanuel Macron is only 20%”, analyzes Chloé Ridel, co-founder of the association Mieux Voter. “This means that, regardless of the winner on April 24, 80% of French people registered on the electoral lists will not have voted for the future president in the first round, whose legitimacy will be extremely fragile.” At least 79% of French people registered on the electoral lists will not have voted for the president who will be elected on April 24. The presidential voting system is archaic; from 2027, it will have to be changed. pic.twitter.com/3fcCVjAyDQ— Mieux Voter (@mieux_voter) April 11, 2022 The association Mieux Voter has been campaigning since its creation, in January 2018, to improve the French electoral system and proposes the implementation of majority judgment. Imagined in the early 2000s by two researchers from the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki, this voting method invites voters to express their opinion on all the candidates by awarding them a mention. A method which makes it possible to assess several applications and to judge them with nuance, without them canceling each other out. “In addition to abstention, the first round of the presidential election has once again highlighted one of the scourges of our democracy: the useful vote, judge Chloé Ridel. Countless voters preferred to bet on a better placed candidate in the polls rather than on his first choice.”>> To read: What is the majority judgment used by the popular Primary? In fact, Emmanuel Macron, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon have benefited a lot from the logic of the useful vote by respectively siphoning off the votes of Valérie Pécresse, Éric Zemmour and the rest of the left. However, in their speeches after the announcement of the results, these three candidates expressed themselves as if all the votes they had collected corresponded 100% to a vote of support.Measuring the real support for a candidateTo put To highlight this paradox, the Mieux Voter association launched, from April 4 to 10, an online consultation to compare the current voting system with majority judgment. Participants were invited to choose their candidate in the first round according to the first-past-the-post system and to evaluate each candidate on a scale of mentions ranging from “Excellent” to “Reject”. Nearly 30,000 people took part in the consultation, including a huge majority of leftist voters. Thus, in the majority ballot, Jean-Luc Mélenchon obtained 55.46% of the votes of the participants, followed by Emmanuel Macron (14.38%) and Yannick Jadot (10.52%). Evaluation by majority vote (Mieux Voter consultation conducted online from April 7 to 10, 2022) © Mieux Voter But even if this consultation did not aim to form a representative sample of the French electorate and that the supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon were over-represented there, “the analysis of the results is however very instructive”, affirms the report written by Mieux Voter, the CNRS and the University Paris-Dauphine. If, without surprise, we find Jean-Luc Mélenchon also at the top of the majority judgment, with a mention “Good”, followed by all the candidates on the left, Emmanuel Macron falls to seventh place, with a mention “Insufficient”. Majority judgment evaluation (Voting Better consultation conducted online from April 7 to 10, 2022) © Better Voting In addition, majority judgment makes it possible to measure the real support for a candidate. “Although 55% of the participants indicated that they intended to vote for Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the classic ballot, only 18% gave him the maximum mention ‘Excellent’, 22% the mention ‘Very good’ and 19 % the mention ‘Good'”, underlines the report. Similarly, “Yannick Jadot’s score in the majority vote (10.52%) does not reflect his real legitimacy since in the majority judgment, 36.7% of the participants believe that he is at least ‘Good'”. note is not a vote “However, are French voters and the political class ready to change the voting system? The experience of the popular primary in January was an opportunity to hear a lot of negative comments about majority judgment. “A note is not a vote. (…) Voters are not judges, they are citizens”, commented in particular the former President of the Republic, François Hollande, on January 31, during a debate organized at Sciences-Po Paris. “A note is not a vote. Beyond the number of participants, the popular primary does not change anything, there are always as many candidates and no political line. What do we want to do, what do we wear! “(2/2) pic.twitter.com/AtuTPFMd3H— Sybil Gerbaud (@SybilGerbaud) January 31, 2022 “It’s good that there is a discussion, replies Chloé Ridel. Any new or revolutionary idea is always welcomed by mockery. But now, the debate exists. It is a subject that must be brought up and this election really shows it. It is no longer possible to have a voting system that leaves so many people on the side. ” In the meantime, the experiment launched by Mieux Voter continues for the second round of the presidential election. And while the consultation launched with its activists by La France insoumise shows that a majority has expressed itself in favor of a blank vote and that many left-wing voters are torn between an Emmanuel Macron vote, a blank vote or the abstention, the majority judgment would allow them to block the far right while judging Emmanuel Macron’s project “insufficient”.