The image has become commonplace in France: for the last dozen years or so, a short while before an election, queues begin to form in front of police stations in large cities, as people wait to set up a proxy. This system allows voting in absentia, with principals assigning proxies to vote on their behalf. Proxy voting is an uncommon practice, initially conceived as an alternative to in-person voting to be used in special circumstances. But it raises new questions about certain long-observed trends in electoral sociology.
Proxy voting, which has existed since the 1940s, has seen two major periods of development in France. The first came in the late 1970s, with the end of mail-in voting, and the second in the 2000s, when restrictions on proxy voting were relaxed. For a long time, proxy voting was extremely rare, involving fewer than 1% of votes, but this figure has increased to as high as 6–9% during a presidential election. Proxy voting is still not widespread: it is costly to set up—whether that cost is reckoned in terms of travel and waiting times, the knowledge required to set up a proxy, or the need to find one. Do these costs discourage those with limited social resources? Proxy voting is however designed to combat abstention by those who cannot get to a polling place on election day, either because they are immobile (especially due to ill health or old age) or are traveling. Does proxy voting thus encourage both the most immobile and the most mobile voters?
This article aims to contribute to our understanding of proxy voting…