During legislative elections, it is common to hear about favorable ballots and unfavorable ballots. But what exactly are we talking about?
During elections, there are a number of specific terms that may escape a majority of French people. It must be said that there are several expressions capable of designating situations that are both new and common. Thus, among terms like “proxy” or “absolute majority”, we sometimes find the opposite expressions called “favorable balloting” and “unfavorable balloting”. If these two terms don’t mean anything to you, don’t panic, we explain everything to you and it’s not very complicated to understand.
What is a favorable waiver?
In order to explain what a favorable ballot is, it is appropriate to recall how the 2024 legislative elections work. These are organized in several constituencies where voters are called to vote by ballot for the party which will represent them within the National Assembly.
At the end of the first round of the legislative elections, if a candidate receives 50% of the votes and a number of votes equivalent to 25% of registered voters, he is directly elected. This is called an absolute majority election.
If no candidate manages to collect this number of votes, a second round is organized within the constituency with candidates who have at least 12.5% of the votes of voters registered for the election. A candidate elected in the second round is generally qualified as “on ballot”. If this candidate is in a position to win, his score is very high and the possible carryover of votes is very favorable to him, he is then said to be “in favorable ballot” for the second round. The possible carryover of votes, or reserve of votes, depends on the eliminated candidates who are politically close to said candidate.
Unfavorable ballot, what are we talking about?
Now that you know the definition of favorable toss, it is quite easy to guess the meaning of its opposite, unfavorable toss.
At the end of the first round, if a candidate collects enough votes to move on to the second round of the election, but is not first in terms of ballots collected or does not have sufficient reserves of votes, of an eliminated candidate close to him, it is said that he is in an unfavorable ballot. This therefore means that he is indeed qualified for the second round of the election, but that he is not the favorite according to the votes counted at the end of the first ballot.