Not a pollEvery declaration is validated by email.
French presidential election 2027 Independent citizen project
Your abstention has a reason. Make it count.
Already decided not to vote in France's 2027 presidential election? Say why. Your reason joins a public counter and anonymous testimonies, so abstention is no longer just a number without a voice.
- 2 minutes
- Published anonymously
- One email validation
This site asks nobody to abstain. It listens to people who have already made that choice. Not a French voter? You can help in other ways.
Not a partyNo candidate, no donations, no voting instruction.
No words put in your mouthTestimonies are published anonymously, verbatim.
The movement, live
Every reason makes the silence clearer
…validated
Target: one million documented reasons. Next milestone: 100 validated declarations. At every milestone, a public report is published.
The site has just opened. The counter shows the real total of email-validated declarations and nothing else — the first declarations are the ones that found the movement.
Your voice, your words
Make your reason heard
Choose what sounds like you. You can stop at the checkboxes or add a few sentences. Your identity is never published. This declaration is only for people registered on the French electoral roll, including French citizens abroad.
- You tick your reasons and, if you want, write why. The testimony is optional.
- You validate by email, one declaration per address. The address remains stored privately to audit validations and handle deletion requests; it is never published or publicly linked to what you wrote.
- Your declaration becomes public: it enters the counter and the breakdown of reasons, and your testimony is published as written after moderation — quoted verbatim in the reports.
The objections, taken seriously
A project that will not answer its critics does not deserve to be believed. Here are ours, including the ones that hurt.
“Not voting lets the extremes win.”
This is the most serious objection, and the answer is not to call on anyone to abstain — this site calls on nobody. It records a choice that millions of people have already made, alone, with nothing written down anywhere.
The objection also assumes the ballot is the only possible signal. A silent abstention costs the system nothing and worries no one; a documented, counted, argued abstention can be argued with. If you believe voting is the best use of your voice: vote. And help anyway — this project needs both.
“It will not change the outcome of the election.”
No, and nothing here claims otherwise. This site does not change the result; it changes what is known about the people who do not take part. Today abstention exists only as a percentage read out at 8pm on election night, with not a single reason attached. Tomorrow it can exist as a public, sourced, reusable corpus — for journalists, researchers and citizens themselves.
What is at stake is not the April 2027 result. It is what can be said, with figures in hand, about the legitimacy that comes out of it.
“Why not cast a blank ballot?”
In France a blank ballot rejects the candidates but endorses the method: by turning up you validate the procedure, and the official count does nothing with it. Abstention withdraws consent from the game itself. Both gestures are respectable; they do not say the same thing. If the blank ballot fits you better, go ahead — and still come and leave an idea.
“You are campaigning for abstention.”
No. This site backs no candidate, collects no donations, calls on nobody to abstain, and has no link to any party or to the French state. It addresses only people who have already decided not to vote, and it takes exactly one position: that decision deserves to be heard with its reasons rather than dismissed as a bloc.
What this site is
- A megaphone for people who have already chosen not to vote
- A public, sourced map of their reasons
- A workshop of ideas for what comes next
What it is not
- A campaign urging anyone to abstain
- A poll or a forecast of the result
- A party, a candidacy, a fundraiser
“What do you do with my email address?”
It is used to send the validation link, prevent duplicates, audit the count and handle deletion requests. It remains stored privately and is accessible only to the project administrator. It is never published, publicly linked to your testimony, sold or used to write to you about anything else. Report subscriptions are stored separately, with double opt-in and one-click unsubscribe. No IP address is kept.
“How do we know the counter is not inflated?”
The counter only shows email-validated declarations, one per address, and nothing is ever seeded: it started at zero and rises at the real pace of real people. The raw figures are public as JSON and the publications as an RSS feed, verifiable by anyone.
Its limit is written into the charter: an email address is not a person. Stronger verification (one voice per phone number, the number never kept in clear text) is planned as volume grows. A small true number beats a large unverifiable one.
“Who is behind this site?”
An independent citizen: no party, no funding, no candidate to promote. The site is in alpha, built and paid for alone. Any question, criticism or deletion request: [email protected] — the replies come from the same person. A full legal notice will accompany the public launch planned for January 2027.
“I am not French — why should I care?”
Because the mechanism is not French. Wherever an election compresses everything a person thinks into one pre-assembled package chosen every few years, the people who walk away are counted but never asked why. France is simply where this experiment is being run first, on a well-defined date: April 2027. The data, the method and the charter are public, so the approach can be copied, criticised or improved elsewhere. Read what we think comes after, or write to [email protected].
Why France cannot get out of it
More than one voter in four abstained in the first round of the 2022 presidential election. Abstention has become the largest political bloc in France, and it is the only one with no spokesperson. That is not an accident. The system is built to last, not to listen, and four mechanisms lock each other in place.
1Tactical voting locks the offer
A two-round election pushes everyone to vote against their fear rather than for their conviction. The established parties know it: they only need to be the least bad of the two finalists. The political offer does not need to convince, only to survive the sort.
2The rules are written by the winners
Changing the voting method, party funding or the institutions requires the agreement of the people whose careers depend on the current rules. Public party funding is indexed on past votes, media access on established weight. Everything rewards what exists; nothing funds what could replace it.
3A derisory bandwidth
Everything you think about health, schools, work, climate or justice is compressed into a single gesture every five years: picking a pre-assembled package you did not assemble. A signal that poor cannot steer a complex society, and each person reasons inside a tiny observation window, never seeing how anyone else reads the world.
4Abstention is invisible by design
A candidate chosen in the first round by one registered voter in five can then wield the entire power of the office. The arithmetic of legitimacy ignores those who stopped playing: abstaining in silence costs the system nothing. That is exactly why this site exists — to make abstention audible, with its reasons.
Changing the system: before AI, with AI
The best answers from before AI
Serious alternatives have existed for a long time. Ranked voting, imagined by Condorcet as early as 1785, where you order the candidates instead of electing just one. Majority judgment, where each candidate is graded on a scale of mentions. And sortition, which ran Athenian democracy and still runs our criminal juries: ordinary citizens, representative by construction, held by no career. These methods remove tactical voting, or the caste of professional candidates. They are studied, tested, solid. None has been adopted: see mechanism no. 2.
Their common limit
Ranking and grading improve the sorting; sortition changes who decides. But none of them widens the bandwidth: a handful of people, appointed for years, still carry the voice of millions on their own. That was the ceiling of what could be done before AI.
What AI makes possible
For the first time, millions of people can be listened to in natural language without being reduced to a checkbox: mapping the arguments, measuring where they converge and where they clash, holding each person's reading of the world against everyone else's, deciding topic by topic instead of handing all the power to one person every five years. This requires rethinking the system from the ground up, not adding a digital layer on top of the existing one.
The traps it avoids
First, the partisan capture of public work: serving the community has become the monopoly of a party caste, where the label matters more than the contribution. With AI-assisted arbitration, far more people can serve, for shorter terms, and each contribution can be assessed transparently, on the record. Second, the war of egos: the current system selects those who survive primaries, TV panels and dirty tricks, and asks them for their worst face. A system where contribution is public, sourced and judged on what it brings pushes everyone to show their best.
The condition: a transparent constitution
Governance assisted by an opaque AI would be worse than the current system. But the opposite is possible: give the AI a transparent constitution, grounded in the most universal and fundamental principles and values, the common good first. Published in full, open to criticism and amendment by anyone, it can be acceptable to all because it is readable by all — no party manifesto has ever offered that guarantee. In the meantime the method applies here at small scale: every synthesis will cite the testimonies it is drawn from (see the charter). The published ideas are where that work starts: add yours.
Published testimonies
Testimonies from validated declarations, published as written after moderation (only illegal or off-topic content is removed). Most are in French, quoted verbatim and never translated silently. Follow publications: RSS feed.
The first published testimonies will appear here after moderation. Yours can be the first: declare and testify.
Ideas for what comes next
Abstaining is not enough: what should replace this? Citizen ideas, anonymous, moderated, quoted verbatim. Open to everyone, wherever you live and whether or not you vote.
The first published ideas will appear here after moderation.
Propose an idea
You vote, or you are not French? You can still help
This site has no budget, no party and no media relay. It only grows if people pass it on. Three gestures, from the shortest to the most useful.
Support it in one click
No email, no account: the “I support this” button at the top of the page counts public support for the approach, separately from abstention declarations. It is the gesture for people who do vote, or who cannot, but think those 13 million voices deserve to be heard.
Send the link to someone who has stopped voting
One private message to someone who will not vote is worth a thousand ad impressions. By a wide margin, that is what brings declarations in.
Criticise it in public
A reasoned objection is worth more than a like. Write to [email protected], or leave it as an idea: the site is in alpha and objections are what fix it.
The honesty charter
- 1No manufactured consensus. Every published synthesis will cite the raw testimonies it is drawn from.
- 2Public method. When the AI analysis arrives, its criteria and its limits will be published with it.
- 3Nobody speaks for you. When in doubt, we quote verbatim. Never a rewording that betrays.
- 4True numbers or no numbers. The counter shows only email-validated declarations, one per address. Its limit is owned: an address is not a person.
- 5No party, no candidate. This site backs nobody and collects no donations. It gives a voice, not an instruction.
Follow what emerges
Get what France's non-voters are actually saying
At every milestone, a public report turns the declarations into a readable map — without smoothing over disagreement.
- A map of the reasons, backed by raw figures
- Testimonies quoted verbatim
- One email per milestone, never noise