Only three weeks after the dissolution of the National Assembly decided by the President of the Republic following the debacle of his party in the European elections, the French are once again called to the polls on Sunday June 30.
If the estimates of the balance of power between the major political groups, expressed in percentages, are generally close to reality, the projections in the number of potential seats for each party are much less so, on the evening of the first round, as the outcome of the second round depends on the specific situations in each of the 577 constituencies.
Estimates, projections in seats and final results: The Decoders of Monde take stock of the different figures circulating on election day.
Read also | Discover the list of candidates for the 2024 legislative elections in your constituency
Add to your selections
Voting estimates revealed at 8 p.m.
At 8 p.m. sharp, the last polling stations in major cities close their doors, lifting the ban on broadcasting results. Most media then wish to give their readers the results of the vote, with the national percentages obtained by each party or coalition. To do this, polling institutes make estimates based on the results of a defined number of offices that they consider representative of the French vote.
Like IFOP or Harris Interactive, Ipsos – which produces the Ipsos-Talan estimate for various media – uses this method. The institute sends its investigators to 560 to 600 offices constituting their sample. Each of them attends the counting and transmits:
- when the office closes, information on the number of voters, to estimate abstention;
- after the first two hundred ballots counted, a partial result with the scores obtained for each candidate;
- at the end of the counting of the polling station, all the results.
The institute centralizes all this feedback and calculates the estimate of the final result based on a statistical model, taking into account geographical particularities (rural municipalities, small or large towns, etc.) and political characteristics (offices traditionally on the left or the right , reversal or consolidation of trends observed in the previous election, etc.)
This is not a simple count: in the case of Ipsos, approximately 70% of the polling stations in the sample close at 6 p.m., 5 to 10% at 7 p.m. and the remainder, 20% to 25% at 8 p.m. Given that it takes approximately one hour to count all the ballots from a polling station (less if abstention is high), the institutes do not have, at 8 p.m., either the partial results of the polling stations that have just closed or even the complete results of those that closed at 7 p.m. Each time counts are added, the algorithms refine the estimates.
Read also | Legislative 2024: what are the programs of the main parties?
Add to your selections
This system has a weakness since it relies on the voting dynamics observed in offices which have already closed, to project them onto those which close at 8 p.m. But they are not always the same. If the results of polling stations closing at 6 and 7 p.m. happen to be 10 points higher for a party or candidate than in previous elections, but the dynamic is different in metropolises closing later, the first estimate given at 8 p.m. risks being erroneous before being refined afterwards. This scenario is rare, but occurred in the first round of the 2022 presidential election: estimates of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s score were around 18% at 8 p.m. before rising during the evening to approach 22% as were took into account the results of large cities, where it made better scores.
Specificities linked to an expected increase in participation
The method described above provides a correct estimate of the national balance of power between the different parties and coalitions. But it only predicts very imperfectly the composition of the future assembly, since this will depend on 577 separate elections.
The world
Support an editorial staff of 550 journalists
Unlimited access to all our content from €7.99/month for 1 year.
Subscribe
In addition, the expected increase in participation risks significantly complicating the situation for pollsters. According to an Ipsos survey of June 27, between 61% and 65% of voters could go to vote, compared to 47.5% in 2022.
Mathematically, the higher the turnout, the more likely it is that three – exceptionally four – candidates will be able to remain in the second round. The two candidates who came in first are qualified, as well as those who obtained a number of votes greater than 12.5% of registered voters. In 2022, due to the low turnout, only 8 three-way races were possible in the 577 elections.
Read also | 2024 legislative elections: practical questions for voting
Add to your selections
“The uncertainty of the seat simulations increases on the evening of the first round with the number of triangulars. For example, with the 2022 results, 60% participation would have led to 120 triangulars, and up to 200 with 65% participation.explains Jean-François Doridot, Managing Director of Ipsos Public Affairs.
Polling institutes must integrate these parameters into their sample of polling stations. “When we prepare a first round, we are already preparing a second roundMr. Doridot specifies. Since we do not know the results of the first round, we need to have polling stations that will reflect all the possible triangular configurations in the second round, in order to be able to anticipate the transfer of votes.”
Read also | Article reserved for our subscribers 2024 legislative elections: high participation announced for a major election
Add to your selections
Projections in “very, very fragile” seats
“Very, very fragile”, “perilous”, “take with great caution”… all the pollsters we interviewed agree on the limits of the seat projections broadcast on the evening of the first round. “It’s as if on the evening of the first round of the presidential election, we were trying to give the score for the second round”explained to us already in 2022, Jérôme Fourquet, director of the opinion department at IFOP. Who recognized that there is a “very strong media and political pressure for there to be screenings in seats” despite limited reliability.
Unlike national estimates in percentages, which are based on the actual results of hundreds of polling stations, the projection in seats is done on the basis of opinion surveys. Harris Interactive surveys 6,000 to 7,000 people on Election Day to “know the sociology of voting, the motivations of voters et potential electoral behavior in the context of the second round.
“We are asking people about the second round without having the result of the first, we do not yet know the duels or the three-way races in their constituency”comments Jean-Daniel Lévy, Director of Politics and Opinion at Harris Interactive. Respondents are asked about several second-round hypotheses, which allows the institutes to calculate possible vote transfers. “The fragility of the seat simulation comes from the fact that it is based on information that is measured before the first round,” says Jean-François Doridot of Ipsos.
To give an idea of the number of seats that each political party could obtain, pollsters take as a basis the national estimate of the results of the first round and project it into each of the French constituencies. This gives the possible 577 posters for the second round on which they model the results of their opinion surveys, to estimate the vote carryovers of unqualified candidates and outline the possible National Assembly at the end of the second round.
Each party is allocated a range of seats, but the margin of uncertainty remains too great. Varying the trend of a political force by one or two points in the first round can thus swing thirty to forty seats in the projected Hemicycle.
The heads of the institutes interviewed all recognize the limits of these figures which do not take into account the particularities of each constituency, local figures, dissidents and the campaign dynamics between the two rounds.
Despite all these limitations, the three polling institutes published seat projections on the evening of the first round two years ago. Jean-François Doridot specifies that if Ipsos will provide seat projections on the evening of the first round, they will not propose them before, “the weaknesses before the election being too strong.”
On the evening of the second round, these projections should on the contrary be more reliable, without however being exact to the nearest seat, since the respondents will, this time, have been questioned on known configurations and no longer simply hypothetical ones.
Official results ticking away until late at night
The Ministry of the Interior, responsible for organizing the elections, begins to broadcast the results by municipality from 8 p.m., then it updates its publications continuously. At the start of the evening, only the results from the smallest municipalities, quickly analyzed, are available.
After the closure and counting of nearly 70,000 polling stations, the results are sent to the prefectures, which themselves send them to the Ministry of the Interior. They are then published gradually. We generally do not know the results of all the constituencies until late in the night from Sunday to Monday.
The results are considered final once validated by the Constitutional Council, after examination of potential cases of irregularities.
A previous version of this article was published in June 2022, on the occasion of the last legislative elections.
