Will the 2022 presidential election be rigged? Less than a month before the election, the fear of manipulation has taken on a new dimension, especially among pro-Zemmour, since the appearance in mid-March of the rumor that the count of the results had been entrusted to the company American Dominion. Intolerable, for part of the French electorate convinced that this company has already helped US President Joe Biden to “steal” victory from Donald Trump in the fall of 2020, as the latter claimed.
The rumor spread from several outraged messages that appeared on social media. « [Le ministre de l’intérieur, Gérald] Darmanin entrusted the American company Dominion (the one that coordinated the fraud in the USA) with compiling the results of the 2022 presidential election and the legislative elections. Without any call for tenders! »protests a royalist Internet user retweeted several thousand times. “We do not change a software that cheats well”quipped another.
A poison imported from the United States
Dominion publishes one of the main software used for voting machines in the United States. According to a study by the Wharton School, a prestigious business school at the University of Pennsylvania, the technology of the Canadian company Dominion Voting Systems affected more than 71 million American voters during the 2016 election, in a total of 1,635 communities. Either the second largest supplier in the country, behind the company Election Systems & Software.
Taking up allegations from his conspiratorial base, Donald Trump accused the software of having “erased 2.7 million Trump votes across the country”. Except that to date, there is no factual basis for this claim.
Two minor technical issues did surface during the 2020 election, a quickly corrected display error and a brief outage in two counties, but they were never associated with massive fraud. This did not prevent the Trumpist thesis from taking root: a year after the election, 71% of Republicans believe that Joe Biden’s victory is not legitimate.
Since then, this fable has been emulated in France. In November 2021, relying on a doctored video, Florian Philippot was already shouting at the “fraud and cheating on the move”, with a view to implementing electronic voting in France. Except that this project was rejected by French senators in February 2021.
No Dominion contract in France
Voting machines are very rare in France. “Only 63 French municipalities are equipped with it, representing 1.3 million voters. Only one model of voting machine is used in France, the ESF1 model from the Dutch company Nedap, marketed by the company Francelections”accurate to World the Ministry of the Interior, while recalling that no fraud has ever been observed in the municipalities involved.
After circulating in January, the rumor has regained strength recently. It was particularly widely distributed on March 17, the day of publication of the Senate report on the influence of consulting firms on public policy. The name of the Dominion company, however, does not appear anywhere in the 361 pages of the report.
The rumor that the Dominion company benefits from a contract with the French State is not based on any factual element. Beauvau is formal:
“The Department of the Interior does not and has never used the services of the Dominion Company in connection with the organization of elections. »
In France, the paper ballots slipped into the ballot box are counted one by one, publicly, as soon as the vote closes. The counting is carried out by scrutineers, a role accessible to any voter in the polling station, under the supervision of the members of the office. The result of the ballot is then recorded in the minutes by the secretary of the office, who sends a copy to a representative of the State. The scores are then aggregated office by office, municipality by municipality, in order to obtain the result of the vote at the national level.
The communication of these results goes through a centralization computer system developed internally and approved by the National Agency for the Security of Information Systems, adds the Ministry of the Interior, which ensures “not to use service providers in the context of these vote centralization operations”.
This system gives less hold to rumors of computer manipulation imported from the United States. “The ballot organized in the old way is what makes the strength of suffrage in France. People are attached to this ritual, especially regular voters, who are the oldest, for whom it is a duty of good citizenship, observes Anne Jadot, lecturer in political science at the University of Lorraine. In comparison, it shows the weakness of the American electoral system. »