The objections, taken seriously

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.

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.

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.

More: dedicated article on the differences between blank vote and abstention, and understanding 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.

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.

Full details: legal notice and privacy policy.

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.

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.

More: full legal notice.

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].