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.

"If we reason in percentage of registered voters, the block abstention-white-null comes largely in the lead in the first round with 27% when Emmanuel Macron only makes 20%", analyzes Chloé Ridel, co-founder of the Better Voter association.

"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

– Better Vote (@mieux_voter) April 11, 2022

The Mieux Voter association 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 his first choice."

>> Read: What is Majority Judgment Used by the People's Primary?

In fact, Emmanuel Macron, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon have fully benefited from the logic of the useful vote by siphoning off the votes of Valérie Pécresse, Éric Zemmour and the rest of the left respectively.

However, in their speech after the announcement of the results, these three candidates expressed themselves as if all the votes they had collected corresponded 100% to a membership vote.

Measure the real adhesion to a candidate

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 asked to choose their candidate in the first round according to the first-past-the-post system and to rate each candidate on a scale of mentions ranging from "Excellent" to "Reject".

Nearly 30,000 people took part in the consultation, the vast majority of whom were left-wing 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, CNRS and Paris-Dauphine University.

If, unsurprisingly, we find Jean-Luc Mélenchon also at the top of the majority judgment, with a "Good" mention, followed by all the left-wing candidates, Emmanuel Macron falls to seventh place, with an "Insufficient" mention. .

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'".

"A rating 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 greeted with mockery. But now, the debate exists. It is a subject that must be brought up and this election really shows. 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".

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