‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ said the deputy mayor as we counted the votes in the Salle du Peuple on Sunday night. This year, as the token Brit on the municipal council, I was promoted from opening the envelopes to actually counting the votes and it was immediately apparent something odd was going on.
We count the ballots by the hundred which means that after every hundred envelopes are counted, we know the percentage share immediately. It was neck-and-neck all night between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen (Macron eventually won, by a whisper) but there was a third party in the race, too.
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For every hundred envelopes we opened, between 10 and in one case more than 20 were spoiled ballots. On some of them, voters had inscribed angry homilies.
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