Voters forced to man polling stations in French towns

AFP via Yahoo!News ^ | Sunday May 5, 2002 | N/A

[TigerLikesRooster]

BASE HREF="http://sg.news.yahoo.com/020505/1/">

Home - Yahoo! - Help - My Yahoo!

World

Home

Top Stories

Singapore

Asia

World

Business

Sports

Tech

Travel

Entertainment

Full Coverage

Sunday May 5, 8:09 PM

Voters forced to man polling stations in French towns

Voters casting ballots in decisive presidential election have found themselves pressed into service as monitors in understaffed polling stations.

Council workers were also called in at the last moment to help out.

In Montpellier in southern France, municipal authorities said they grabbed at least 84 early voters and, under a provision in the electoral law, were making them sit out the day in the stations that did not have the required four monitors.

Out of Montpellier's 115 polling stations, only three had sufficient monitor numbers to operate from the 8:00 am (0600 GMT) opening.

Half had only two monitors -- one each from the centre-right Rally for the Republic party (RPR) of incumbent President Jacques Chirac and from the National Front of extreme-right challenger Jean-Marie Le Pen -- and another 42 had none at all.

The supervisor of each polling station with a shortfall drafted in the first voters with reliable electoral records to make up the numbers, though the delay meant several stations opened a little late, the authorities said.

They added that they preferred to say the Shanghaied voters were "volunteers" rather than "requisitioned".

In Villeurbanne in the Rhone region of southeastern France, voters offered to help out as monitors in 60 polling stations following an appeal late Friday from the local mayor.

On Friday, the National Front had only nine assessors compared to the RPR which had the required 60, the mayor's office said.

In the Mediterranean port city of Marseille, council workers were called in late Friday after it became evident there would not be enough people on Sunday to ensure the required number of monitors for each of the 444 polling stations.

Email this story

Printer friendly version

More from > World

Previous Story:	Rescuers find 44 dead from Bangladesh ferry (Reuters)
Next Story:	South African space tourist lands safely (Reuters)

More from > World News from AFP

ADVERTISEMENT

---

Copyright © 2002 AFP. All rights reserved. All information displayed in this section (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the contents of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presses.

Copyright © 2002 Yahoo! Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy - Terms of Service - Community - Help

[TigerLikesRooster]

Would this cause a dispute about Voter Fraud from either party if things do not go as they expected ?

[July 4th]

Le Pen has already leveled charges of vote tampering. FYI, to all who are following the election today, results should be coming in at 2pm EST, and C-SPAN will have live coverage at 6pm EST. (subtitles)

[My Identity]

The video all of France wants banned:

Click to view the video
Or right-click to download
(2MB MPEG file) © NBC

[E. Pluribus Unum]

If Chirac doesn't manage to get out enough voter fraud, the Commies will suddenly discover they accidentally voted for Le Pen because of the confusing butterfly ballot.

[mewzilla]

Maybe they should have offered free stinky cheese to voters who'd vote early and often...

[E. Pluribus Unum]

What could the cheese-eating surrender-monkeys possibly find offensive about that?

Was that a Saturday Night Live production? Where did it come from?

[Diddle E. Squat]

Hmmm, Carville been doing any consulting work down on the Seine?

[My Identity]

Was that a Saturday Night Live production?

Yes! Aired in mid April, apparently.