How is dropping an envelope in a box more secure? It would seem trivial for an attacker to create one or more fake ballots and slip them in the box along with their real ballot.
One enveloppe is given to you on the polling station when you show your id and it is checked against the voter list.
You have then to go to a place where you are hidden when you put your ballot inside the enveloppe
Once the election is over, when counting if one enveloppe has more than one ballot it is counted as "nul" (void ballot). Enveloppe number is checked against the number of voting people who showed up.
Regular citizen volunteers are doing the opening and counting. Candidates can designate people of their choice to monitor each counting table. Everyone can write a remark on things not done to rules in an official document.
The "Conseil Constitutionnel" will rule on the voting process and issue a detailed report.
French ballot boxes are transparent. And you can only insert your envelope when the person in charge presses a lever to open the entry slot. Even for a magician / trickster it would be hard to attack.
But the important thing is that anybody with two eyes (or at least one) and some basic cognitive abilities can understand what is going on and make sure that there is nothing shady going on.
Basically any citizen can take a sandwich, a bottle of water and spend the day in his local voting place from beginning to end and have a reasonable certainty that the voting process was fair.
I think this is very important for democracy. It does not solve other problems (fair access to media...) but at least the voting part is reliable.
The envelope is dropped under close scrutiny by officials in a standard box with a thin slit, it is unlikely that one would be able to insert fake ballots there.
Even if that was possible, after the vote closes the ballots are counted and the amount must match the number of people who voted, so the result would be invalidated.
>Even if that was possible, after the vote closes the ballots are counted and the amount must match the number of people who voted, so the result would be invalidated.
So an attacker could potentially invalidate hundreds (or thousands) of votes by stuffing a single fake ballot into the box? This seems like the illusion of security.
About 10 000 votes have been invalidated in total, which is an order of magnitude less than the smallest difference between two candidates, and 40 times less than the amount of votes which decided which candidates are going to be present for the 2nd turn.
Only one voting office reported a significant discrepancy between the amount of ballots and the amount of voters, resulting in 475 invalidated votes.
> So an attacker could potentially invalidate hundreds (or thousands) of votes by stuffing a single fake ballot into the box? This seems like the illusion of security.
In Canada poll workers initial the ballots, and the ballots have serials numbers on them and a stub (which also has the S/N) that is torn off by poll worker:
> The election worker checks their initials and the assigned polling station number on the back of the ballot; compares the counterfoil number against the stub number in the booklet and makes sure they are the same; takes off the counterfoil and tears it up; and gives the ballot back to you to put in the ballot box. You slide your ballot into the ballot box where it is mixed in with other ballots. No one will know how you voted.
>Invalidating a box could result in up to a thousand votes being discarded indeed, which is quite small though for a national election.
I don't know what are the typical margins of victory for French Elections. In the 2000 US Presidential Election, George W. Bush won the Presidency by a margin of 537 votes in Florida. If the US had implemented French style balloting, a single attack of this kind in a heavily Republican district of Florida could have easily swayed the election to Gore.
Election supervisors look for this. Also, the ballots themselves are not "write your vote on paper", they are specifically printed and available at the polling station.
The way the vote works is:
1. Come in at the polling station you are alloted to, based on your address.
2. Show your ID, and have them verify you are indeed on the electoral lists for this polling station.
3. Receive the ballot papers. These are stamped by the election official before they are given to you. You receive one ballot paper for each election currently organized (e.g. one paper for choosing your mayor, one paper for choosing your president etc). You also receive an official stamp. You are responsible for checking that the ballot you received is valid (stamped in exactly one place by the election official, not torn or scuffed etc). You can ask any election official for help if you suspect something is wrong.
4. Go into a polling booth, and put the stamp on the box for the candidate you want. Fold the ballot so your choice is not immediately visible (producing evidence of who you voted for, such as taking a picture or showing your ballot to someone else is a crime, punishable with a fine or jail time).
5. Put the ballot in the ballot box. There may be a single ballot box for all ballots, or one ballot box per election.
That's it - normally takes ~5 minutes, unless there are lines, which can happen at certain hours in certain busy places. Still, the size of polling stations is set by law to be big enough for the electoral lists of the area they are close to.
Counting is then simple:
1. Once the election day is officially closed, the ballot boxes are opened. Officials from each participating party are present in each polling station, and they perform the following operations together.
2. All ballots are validated and sorted. Any ballot which is not valid (e.g. not the right paper, not stamped by the election official, stamped in multiple places by the voter, stamped outside the vote area, paper is torn etc) is discarded. The discarded ballots are still numbered and stored, in case of disputes.
3. All ballots are opened and counted. Results are tabulated, and signed by all election officials in the polling station. The counted and sorted ballots are stored in secured bags. Results are communicated electronically to regional and then national election commissions.
3.5 Ballot counts must exactly match voter counts for this station. If they don't, police are called and videos are reviewed to identify the cause. Stolen or stuffed ballots are crimes and carry heavy fines or prison.
4. Election officials start collecting the bags from each polling station and storing them with each regional election commission office. The polling station attendants are responsible for ensuring the ballots arrive safely at the destination regional election office.
5. The process repeats until everything is centralized at the national electoral comission.
Preliminary results are typically announced starting ~1 h after the polls close.
Final results are typically announced the day after, usually by the night time.
Disputes at any level are arbitrated by the electoral commissions, and can be raised all the way up to the courts.
Any citizen can register beforehand and volunteer to work as an electoral official in any polling place, and personally monitor the process. Journalists and NGOs regularly do this.
Each political party keeps a separate, unofficial running count of the results.
The whole things scales beautifully, and is very hard if not impossible to systematically defraud (unless political parties systematically collude against their own candidates, but if they are willing to do that, the results don't really matter anymore anyway).
You have then to go to a place where you are hidden when you put your ballot inside the enveloppe
Once the election is over, when counting if one enveloppe has more than one ballot it is counted as "nul" (void ballot). Enveloppe number is checked against the number of voting people who showed up.
Regular citizen volunteers are doing the opening and counting. Candidates can designate people of their choice to monitor each counting table. Everyone can write a remark on things not done to rules in an official document.
The "Conseil Constitutionnel" will rule on the voting process and issue a detailed report.
https://www.conseil-constitutionnel.fr/les-decisions/type/PD...