Once, not two. From their prison, detainees will not be able to vote in the municipal and inter-municipal elections of March 15 and 22. No polling station will be opened in penal establishments, due to organizational "difficulties" , according to the prison administration.
Read also: 5,342 prisoners will vote in the European elections
Promise of Emmanuel Macron, the possibility of participating in the ballot from their prison, via ballots then sent and centralized to the Ministry of Justice, had been offered to them during the last European elections in May. A first, aimed at making the voting rights of detainees not deprived of their civil rights more effective.
"A shame"
Result, about 8% of them, or 4,550 citizens, had expressed themselves, according to the direction of the prison administration (DAP). Almost as many individuals had expressed the wish to vote, but could not ultimately do so, due to the lack of registration on the electoral lists. Voters had placed the National Rally in the lead (23.52% of the votes), ahead of La France Insoumise (19.68%). In 2017, only 2% of the prison population participated.
Read also: Prisoners participate little in the polls
This year, the prison administration invokes the "complexity" of such an operation for a local ballot with two rounds, at the end of which the ballot papers should have been sent to different municipalities, depending on the place of registration of detainees. "It would have been complicated," concedes a prison administration official, Amin Mbarki, with Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Two possibilities to vote
So back to the situation before the Europeans. Prisoners have two possibilities to vote, open since 1994:
- establish a power of attorney
- get an exit permit to join your polling station
"We want to do away with the absurdity of this system", rises in Liberation the director general of the Robin des Lois association, François Korber, in favor of a wider vote by prisoners. According to him, "it is a shame that [the Minister of Justice] Nicole Belloubet and [the Minister of the Interior] Christophe Castaner did not have the political will to pursue" the device deployed during the European elections.
To remove the constraints, the prison administration ensures that measures will be adopted "from 2021" . Prisoners should be able to entrust powers of attorney to voting citizens in a municipality other than their own. Upon arrival in prison, they should also be "systematically" entered on an electoral list.