As the first round of legislative elections takes place this Sunday, June 30, problems with the professions of faith and the ballot papers have been noted.
The distribution of envelopes containing electoral propaganda is being sent to the 9 constituencies of Hérault. And must end before this Sunday, June 30, the day of the first round of the legislative elections.
The Hérault prefecture, responsible for sending electoral documents, specifies that it has called upon the service provider Viaposte (a subsidiary of La Poste) as for the European elections to carry out the mission of stuffing electoral propaganda into envelopes “this time within very tight deadlines.”
The mailing process was able to take place from Wednesday, June 19 to Monday, June 24. Once completed, the documents were delivered to voters’ mailboxes.
“Electoral propaganda is currently being distributed by the postal operator to voters in the 9 constituencies of the department. It is completed in some of the municipalities, and in progress in all the others”explains the prefecture.
As a reminder, the Sud-PTT union has been calling for several days on postmen not to distribute electoral envelopes until a bonus of 1,000 euros – corresponding to the three distributions, legislative and European – is paid by La Poste.
Controls
But the prefecture services add that despite the checks carried out daily, voters and candidates have reported irregularities in the contents of certain envelopes. The most frequent being the receipt of envelopes containing propaganda and ballot papers corresponding to candidates from another constituency.
In view of these anomalies observed, the State services asked the service provider to carry out random checks on the envelopes not yet distributed in all the districts of the department.
A maximum of 9,800 envelopes could be affected
The prefecture specifies: “To date, the checks have revealed residual and localised anomalies: a maximum of 9,800 envelopes are likely to be affected out of a total of 864,693 registered voters (i.e. 1% at most of the envelopes distributed) spread across constituencies no. 3, 4, 5, 7, 8 and 9.”
Before completing that for the second round, scheduled for Sunday July 7, “the operations of inserting electoral propaganda will be subject to reinforced control measures”, so that this type of incident does not happen again.
Devices to overcome the problem
However, voters who encounter problems will be able to consult the candidates’ professions of faith on the dedicated online site.
But also in town halls: supplies are underway in the town halls affected by the anomalies to make the candidates’ professions of faith available to voters.
The prefecture also reminds that the candidates’ ballot papers will be available, as for each election, in all polling stations on election day.
