It's simple, safe and efficient. I don't understand why USA are not doing something similar. All this voting machines, mail votes, counting/recounting where ballots are manipulated by so many people seems strange, inefficient and prone to fraud.
It's a very easy explanation. France and many other countries in Western Europe like it have a National Identity register. You simply cannot exist in society without being effectively registered with the government. (Which of course is free to citizens, and primarily offers convenience not burden)
That national ID system is what ensures electoral integrity allowing the actual technical aspects of elections to be simple safe and efficient.
And the reason why this can never work in the US is because culturally and politically, Americans deem that this level of federal government knowledge of it's citizens location and existence, is an imposition on liberty. This is true broadly across political lines (even if the more Left-leaning folks are comfortable with imitating Europe, and the more Right-leaning folks are comfortable with introducing burdens to voting with NOT free identity requirements)
As a Canadian who moved to Europe and then went back, I genuinely see value in both philosophies.
Thus, many people vote in a different place than where they live and where they are registered for the tax admin. The address on one's identity card is often obsolete by a decade. The address on my passport is yet another one, obsolete as well but that doesn't actually matter because it's never used as a proof of residence.
Social security is the closest thing there is in France to a national register, but no other admin or organisation is allowed to use the social security number. And the contact address they have can very well be out of date as well.
Law enforcement came to "my door" a few months ago (to ask if I could help them with logs of my server on a case) and they actually were lucky because they came to my parents' house (an address I had forgotten to update in my host's contact info) just as I was on holidays there, but they didn't even know I had been living in Belgium for years. Since I wasn't a suspect, they had no right to actually know any info from the various national administrations.
I lived in Canada for a year and some and it seemed to me to be basically the same, although maybe I didn't stay long enough to know more about how it works there.
For elections, this is important combined with the requirement in France to show a photo ID at the polling station (well, this is France so the obligation is not always one, but still...)
In the US, requirements to show a photo ID vary by state, some don't have any, afaik. In the UK no photo ID is asked at all. Neither country has ID cards.
There's so many of them there isn't need for one centralized file, especially since news laws keep interconnecting all these files. There's so many files on everyone in France if you believe in "human rights" that'll be hard to fathom.
Since the nazi occupation (Vichy government), there is a national identity card. There's also the police file with all suspects, victims and witnesses (yes, all of them combined). Then there's the police biometrics file. The semi-secret "Base élèves" file snooping on every child going to school (which by law is quasi-mandatory). And so many others i can't list them all here.
France is pretty much a police state in all regards. If you're lucky enough to only interact with lowly assholes from the local police, it's easy enough to discard the concept. But when you see the government had to contract Palantir because they gather so much data on people they can't process it...
There is no national ID system in the UK, which has elections that are simple, safe and efficient.
Sure, there are sometimes recounts - if the margin of victory in the first count is very close. Third-party "ninjas" are not used for such recounts, which are generally complete by the end of the day after the ballot (they don't take months, as in Arizona). No scandal is associated with a recount - they're routine. There can be no parliamentary vote to allow or forbid a recount.
Each name/address pair on the register gets to vote once, because the name is struck off the register when the ballot is issued.
If I pretended to be someone else to use their ballot, it would be discovered when they attempted to cast it themselves. Since about 50% of people vote, there's about a 50:50 chance that any single fraudulent vote would be detected. Fraudulent voting on a significant scale is certain to be detected; and it hasn't been.
The motives for debating a national ID are therefore nothing to do with election security.
A crooked householder could, I suppose, register 5 dead people at his address; if he got caught, he'd be prosecuted. With 10 crooked householders, you could get 50 crooked votes. Hardly any elections turn on that few votes.
Some of it because there is no ID, as said, and register is often out of date: For example when you move into a new home the local council will at some point sends you a list of people registered at your address to check it is still valid. How many times can you them vote? It is said that some houses in less than great neighbourhoods have up to 30 people registered as residents on the electoral register.... Right. That said this usually raises eyebrows and people do get caught [1]
Another example, because electoral registers are independently managed by councils people can be registered in several location and thus vote several times (though it is not legal). It was admitted that some students did that to vote twice in the Brexit referendum, for instance (once at their parents', once at university).
But it is downplayed because people don't want IDs and because fraud probably does not skew results (at least nationally).
[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1176591/Tory-counci...
In any case, why would you need IDs in the first place? That's a tool of social control. As anecdote, the only time in French history when it was mandatory to have an ID card was during nazi occupation.
Many homeless people here don't have ID because to make one you need an address, and to get an address to receive papers you need an ID (circling dependency).
In France, it requires citizenship to have an ID card. Legal immigrants are given a "titre de séjour", while undocumented people (by definition) don't have any of these. As a white person whose grandparents were immigrants, i've never been asked for ID in my entire life (except for official administration stuff or one of the times i was detained by police for political activities) ; this contrasts with my non-white friends who are frequently stopped by police for an "ID check".
The ID check is used by french police as a means of controlling and humiliating popular non-white suburbs. It's not uncommon in these places for cops to know the actual names of the people they're controlling, and the control itself is just another form of harassment.
There has been many anti-racist campaigns in France over the years denouncing "contrôle au faciès" (looks-based checks). If you speak some french, you can see some of the videos from those collectives who will tell you more about this practice.
Now, specifically about elections, asking for ID (not proof of residency) willingly excludes foreigners. All the while forging plausible ID cards is very accessible to bad actors (retail price of a few hundred euros a piece). So no, i don't exactly see the point.
> I am non white and find this very racist.
Sorry to offend you. It was my impression that getting an ID in the USA can also be very complex (leading to many people being undocumented) but i may be wrong about that.
The fallacy of the left is that for them (in France and USA) a black person or a muslim person is of one kind. just like a hivemind we have to be all same and opressed because cops are bad.
What was the issue for me during those 20 years were the rampant religious zealots trying to push their agenda on me. Forcing girls to wears the "right" clothes, building one-way windows hairdresser for women and islamic supermarkets right in the city center. Backed by leftists that again thought of immigrant as some kind of hivemind that all wanted this "religious freedom" they called through their "anti racism" campaigns. Ive seen all those leftist coming to some neighborhood and praising themselves of living among the diversity and sending their kids to private school too so that they don't spend time with the immigrants sons. I am not denying that the police makes mistakes, that controle au facies has some negative effects witht people who dress like rap / hood dudes and have normal decent lives but its more a by product of them tolerating the other side of the "immigrants" because of the lies the left sold them : that they are all same opressed by a society that does not want them. My life shows me that we are all same below the 1% whatever our color those are the people that will make us suffer, lower our wage, push our retirement age. the cops are just a piece of a broken system that are also victim of those 1%. Ive worked through my career with cops and I would never want to do their job in a country like France or the US.
Good for you. I can't say the same, personally, though these humiliations and violence were never "au faciès".
> they were dressing like rap singers
Yes. Just like cops harass and beat white punks, but won't bother a person in a suit: there's an intersection between class oppression and race oppression. Though in the case of muslim women (eg. in birkini) harassed by police, you can't really say that they were "swearing to cops".
> we have to be all same and opressed because cops are bad
Of course all cops are bastards, but of course not people are not all the same and don't live the same situations. Just because individual experiences vary does not mean there isn't some systemic factors at play.
> sending their kids to private school too so that they don't spend time with the immigrants sons
So true.
> we are all same below the 1% whatever our color those are the people that will make us suffer, lower our wage, push our retirement age
We are not the same: we have different experiences and perspectives. But i agree with your point that we all have interests in common against the vampires that profit off of our misery. But i feel like it's important to acknowledge our diversity and differences ; the traditional left in the first half of the 20th century has notoriously failed to incorporate antisexist and antiracist analysis in their worldview, insisting that class struggle is the unique struggle that matters. For women's rights, the situation has been reversed in the second half of the century, despite much hypocrisy and not going very far down this slope. The rise of a new generation of intersectional Left (inspired by eg. Angela Davis) could change the narrative, but this growing movement is not represented in the media or in mainstream (party) politics.
> the cops are just a piece of a broken system that are also victim of those 1%
That is true. Cops are just pawns. Yet they make the conscious decision to become pawns to those 1% and harass, imprison, mutilate or assassinate those who don't fit in this society. They are the armed hand of the State making sure people stay homeless when there are empty flats, or stay hungry when every supermarket has so much food they throw away.
Also, some cops (not all) are very happy to endorse the role of the persecutors and go beyond their role as neutral tools of the State. Police and gendarmes have famously over 60% votes for the national front. Many cops are part of conspiracies with neonazi groups or drug trafficking gangs, and they face few (if any) consequences. This is also related with how police recruitment, education, and equipment has changed over the past decades, but this is yet another can of worms to open. Overall, i would strongly recommend reading Mathieu Rigouste's books on the history of police in France.
This is the historical context in which ID voting requirements have been imposed. Often, ID facilities are deliberately under-resourced and placed out of reach of economically disadvantaged communities. You typically need a functioning vehicle, gas and to wait a (sometimes significant) amount of time on a workday during working hours to get an ID.
The same tactics are used with polling places themselves. During the very last Presidential election, the Texas governor limited facilities to only one ballot dropoff location per county[1], the largest of which needed to serve 4 million people.
Then you grab your ballot form off the person, wander on over to a booth, mark it as you so desire (formally, informally, a dick drawn on the ballot paper, leaving it blank, a tirade of abuse towards the clowns in the corridors of power, a combination of the above[1], etc.), fold it over, wander to the area with the cardboard boxes for depositing it in, and stroll on out to the BBQ for a democracy snag.
If you are not in your voting area (e.g. you're on holidays on the day), you can vote at any location as they have another, bigger system that lists all of the people outside that electorate. They will print you off the corresponding ballot and then your ballot goes into a second box for collecting the votes of wayward souls who needed to do their civic duty, and those votes are dealt with separately
These boxes containing the completed ballot papers then remain sealed and under formal watch by the Australian Electoral Commission until counting time after polls close that evening. Once counted, they're securely kept for any formal review as required.
Voting only ever occurs on a Saturday. You can also do a postal vote, or pre-polling (going to a reduced set of polling booths before the election day, if you know you're going to be busy).
Many schools, churches, public buildings, etc. are commandeered as voting centres. It is rare to need to queue more than 15 mins. I usually walk in to find maybe 2 people in front of me. Like the French system, this makes tallying the votes a very parallel affair but also means that the barrier to voting is essentially nil. Given the compulsory voting laws, the government is compelled to eliminate all barriers to voting.
You'll note a few things here:
1) Although you register with the AEC, no physical ID is required to vote. The registration process is exceedingly simple, contains minimal data[2], and the government piggy-backs on to various services (e.g. drivers licences) to provide pathways for people to register. For example, I got an address change sticker for my licence today, and the page is 1/3 dedicated to that and 2/3 dedicated to reminding me to update my electoral registration to my new address.
This means you can in theory vote in multiple different polling booths in the same or different electorates. The AEC will scrutinise this and you can be fined if you do it. However, AEC research suggests that it is very low decimal percentages of voters who try to vote multiple times, and most of those that do, do so by accident rather than malice.
For example, in 2010 there were 12.4 million votes (out of 14 million elegible electors). Of that, 16,210 letters were sent to apparent multiple-voters, with 6,254 subsequently noted as clerical errors (i.e. somehow they were marked off twice accidentally). 1,454 people (0.01%) subsequently admitted to voting multiple times, and of that only 19 were referred to the police. Over 80% of multiple-voters were the elderly, new electors confused about the process, or those with language difficulties.
The AEC reviews this each year, and the magnitude of the numbers tends to be the same, and discussion + the above figures can be found here: https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart...
2) You don't actually have to vote. Other countries bemoan our 'compulsory voting' laws, without understanding that you can get your piece of paper and then immediately stroll out and throw it in the bin. It's the getting-your-name-struck-off-the-register part that matters. On balance, this draws people out but gives them the ability to opt out of the democratic process if they're serious about it. This detail is often lost in the debate, I find.
3) It is all paper-based, much like the French process. The AEC employs an army of people each election (most sign up only for that specific election, only a minority are full-time AEC employees) to scrutineer the process. It is supervised and has numerous checks and measures in place. Recounts can happen at the appeal of any party, and will often occur in close races. Being paper-based, there is a relatively immutable physical record that can be scruineered and independently audited. It is a very simple system by design, and that is one of its core strengths.
[1]: the Australian Electoral Commission specifically clarified that a ballot that is legibly formal but ALSO has a dick drawn on it is still counted as a formal vote and will therefore be counted: https://twitter.com/AusElectoralCom/status/37514210996088832...
[2]: The AEC holds name, date of birth and address. They will cross-link with other state and federal systems to send reminders about registration, but otherwise they keep very little data about citizens: https://aec.gov.au/Enrolling_to_vote/About_Electoral_Roll/
Which is terrible because, I agree with your stake : our voting procedure is probably one of the few things that works perfectly in our political system. Nobody ever complained about it and it have never been hijacked.
That's a strange interpretation.
Regarding elections the key is that the French Republic put a very strong emphasize on equality among citizens. So all citizens should be represented in Parliament and all citizens have the right to vote for the President.
For instance there is a French MP who is elected in North America to represent French citizens who live in the USA and Canada in the French Parliament [1]. Map of the constituencies [2] (The MP for the 11th constituency must max out on air miles).
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premi%C3%A8re_circonscription_...
[2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ais_%C3%A9tablis_hor...
We all know that having a single turn (like in the US) leads to a political landscape with 2 major political parties and few nuances (but the major problem in the US system is "the winner takes it all" policy in most states: if the number of members of the electoral college were proportional to votes in each states, the results would already be more fair)
But the French system (with 2 turns) is also very far from optimal and non-linear, and also leads (to a lesser extent, and some variants/surprises) to 2 major political parties + some smaller "satellite" political parties. And some issue are for example that
* sometimes, a candidate that would win against all others has a too low score at the first turn to pass to the 2nd turn (this is what happens in 2007 where all polls said that François Bayrou (who was center/moderate and more consensual) would have won both against Nicolas Sarkozy and against Ségolène Royal, but couldn't get enough votes to pass the 1st turn)
* sometimes, the opposite issue happens i.e. a candidate that has no chances to win the 2nd turn has enough votes to pass the 1st turn: this is what happened in 2002 when Le Pen (extreme right wing) supplanted Jospin and went to the 2nd turn (that Chirac was then 100% certain to win at that time, with a consequence that there were no real/constructive debate about the programs)
* some people who have new ideas cannot participate because you need 500 signatures of already-elected people in order to participate (so if you are not a member of an established political party, it's very hard to become a candidate to the presidential election)
Just to say that there is no binary split between "democracy" and "dictature" : the voting system and algorithm influences a lot the political landscape and therefore the debates. Maybe people here are familiar with the Condorcet method used (among other things) in https://www.debian.org/vote which is better in my opinion (yet a little bit difficult to implement in a wider scale such as a presidential election). Another approach / voting method that I quite like is this one (only in French, sorry) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugement_majoritaire : I like it because 1°/ it is simple to implement and to understand, 2°/ it would inherently avoid the issues above and forces the candidates to be more consensual (i.e. to become "president for everyone") rather than cleaving, while still enabling nuances to express during the debates (not only on a "binary" axis left/right).
I am surprised you chose this example when an even clearer example was the Jospin/Chirac/LePen situation during the previous election