It's been a year and a half since Covid-19 has affected all areas of our lives - including elections.
The pandemic had required to postpone the second round of municipal elections last year.
This time, it is the regional ones that could be impacted.
Not by a new confinement, since the tendency is rather towards relaxation, but perhaps by a high abstention, or even a lack of assessors which would disrupt the organization of the polling stations.
Read alsoRegional elections: town halls are desperately looking for assessors
As we explained at the end of May, mayors are desperately looking for people willing to occupy these places, necessary for the proper functioning of polling stations, which must necessarily have a president - usually the mayor, a deputy, a municipal councilor or an inhabitant delegated by the mayor, a secretary, assessors, designated by "the authorized political formations" specifies the Constitutional Council, and scrutineers, generally activists.
In addition to the reluctance linked to Covid-19, the difficulty of finding assessors can also come from the certain disinterest in this election, more marked than for municipal elections - those of last year had however seen their abstention rate climb.
"With the mayors, there is a daily aspect, of proximity", begins Guillaume Tusseau, professor of public law at the law school of Sciences Po. While with "the territorial millefeuille, it is difficult to identify which competences lie with the region.
This lack of visibility means that people are less interested in it, ”he notes.
And more broadly, "the decline in participation is a strong French political trend".
Irregularity does not always mean cancellation
The risk of running out of assessors is foreseen by the texts - in particular because there have already been precedents - which propose solutions. The deficiency can be filled by the municipal councilors, in the order of the list, or by the electors present who can read and write, starting with the oldest if only one is missing, then the youngest s 'you need two, then the second oldest and the second youngest if necessary. Even if, health context requires, this type of choice will still have to be subjected to a constraint: the assessors will have to be vaccinated or present a negative test (autotest, antigen or PCR).
“Normally, with the whole substitution process, there shouldn't be a massive shortage,” reassures Guillaume Tusseau. Even if, in the most rural and less populated municipalities, where the municipal council is small due to demographics, the difficulty of finding assessors and other members of the polling station is real. But the risk could rather come from litigation: "if a party does not manage to have an assessor or scrutineer present, that can fuel the dispute," he continues.
Not enough to have a big impact. According to the Constitutional Council, the fact that there was only one person to run the office at one time of the day "is considered to be such as to lead to the cancellation of the results" only in serious cases. disruptions, such as the lack of attendance, voting in the voting booth or even ballot boxes left unattended. "I think that this kind of case is quite rare", estimates Guillaume Tusseau. Who confirms to us that irregularity does not mean cancellation, even if, for regional elections, it is not the Constitutional Council which decides but the administrative tribunal. "If there is a problem of scrutineers or classic irregularity, we will cancel the votes of the municipality, which will therefore be excluded from the result at the departmental or regional level",but if these fewer votes have no effect on the final result, "the ballot will not be canceled", adds the professor. For example, if the contested municipality brings about twenty votes, while the difference is 1000 between two candidates or pairs, the impact will not be very important and the result very probably not rejected.
Moreover, if the only precedent for France in these times of pandemic is the last round of municipal elections, other countries have managed to organize elections during the pandemic, such as Israel or Spain.