Alter-votants, a platform created in 2017, symbolically allows you to give your vote to a foreigner residing in France who does not have the right to vote. The approach is clear, it is a question of putting the right to vote of foreigners back into the electoral debate. Five years ago, nearly 5,000 people signed up. Three weeks into the first round, there were only a few dozen, but registrations are increasing as the first round approaches.
The principle of the platform Alter-voters Is simple. All you have to do is go to the site, fill out a form and the link is established between the French citizen who has the right to vote but does not wish to exercise it and the foreigner who does not.
” The foreign people who register, they have a real desire to participate, for once, explains Thomas Berteigne, initiator of the project. I think it’s linked to the fact that we’ve been talking about foreigners a lot more for a decade than before, and we show them much more as a problem, and I think that precisely these people sign up for show their point of view, that they are integrated, that they have an opinion. »
Léa, a 26-year-old Lebanese girl, registered on the platform. She has lived in France for 5 years. ” I need to vote in fact and with this platform, well it allows me to send a message, to pass a voice, that we hear it. »
Raphael, a guitar teacher, will allow a foreign woman excluded from this right to vote to be represented. ” It was good because I was about not to vote, he said, I actually realized that it was a privilege for the person I spoke to on the phone, it makes a big difference. I am proud to give her my voice so that she goes there in my place in a way. »
And it is he who will go to the polling station to deposit in the ballot box the ballot with the name of the candidate chosen by his partner.
