There is a bin to dispose of the other papers, or dispose of them elsewhere for complete anonymous. Most people just take the one they want, or the few they are still undecided before getting in the booth.
This has reminded me what happened on the other side of the Alps in the elections of 1929. People received two envelopes. One with the national flag on the inside and a white one. They left inside the booth the one they didn't like and gave the other one back to the scrutineers. The outside was almost the same but the color inside was visible from the outside [1] Guess the result. Hint: almost 99% to 1%.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Italian_general_election
[2] https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elezioni_politiche_in_Italia_d... for more details and pictures of the cards inside out.
You actually have the obligation to take at least two of them. I'm not sure how strongly this is enforced, but most people take a few of them.
That would open hacks like "pick my card and my worst opponent one, vote for me and show me my opponent card. And pray that I get at least as many votes as the cards of my opponent that people bring to me."
I think a major difference is that in most places in Europe at least there is no "Other" option - the list of candidates is fixed by some legal date before the election. Doing anything other than choosing one of the official candidates simply means that your vote is invalid. Invalid votes are all counted together, not matter what made them invalid (a torn paper is counted the same as a paper where you wrote Mickey Mouse or spilled coffee on it); with the possible exception of blank votes, which are sometimes counted separately as "protest votes" (though I don't believe they have any legal significance, at best they may carry symbolic significance).
Was there a meeting where everyone agreed to make a confusing change to the spelling and no-one told me about it?
It has nothing at all to do with "biased".
EDIT: Other poster explained it maybe better as "being yourself and not caring what others think of you".
Well, that's at least one aspect of "being cool", so I still feel they are at least vaguely related.
I've read it as high quality, high character, or high value depending on the subject.
> Based has been appropriated by the alt-right online as a general term of praise, as if “un-woke.”
https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/based/
Well, TIL.
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...
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.
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.
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.
* https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=int/sa...
So there's a record of which ballots were put in via proper workflow.
If there's a discrepancy the non-proper ballots can be identified and removed.
From Elections Canada:
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.
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).