The abstainers for the vote have sent a message to the abstainers for the reform on vote

L'abstention a été la principale caractéristique du 1er tour des élections municipales d'Angers. Aucun candidat n'a réalisé un score équivalent à celui des abstentionnistes. S'il est de bon ton de railler ces derniers, il pourrait être plus utile de s'interroger sur les raisons de ce phénomène. Dans une ville telle qu'Angers, où les moins de 30 ans  représentent près de la moitié des habitants, elles peuvent être liées au décalage technologique entre les outils de communication d'aujourd'hui et les modes de votation... d'hier.

As in many other cities, Angers represen-tatives, both from left and right, are plagued by the numbers of the abstainers for the first round of the municipal elections. Their proportion, 40.77%, is more important than the score of the winner of the first round, Christophe Béchu, with 35.91% and is, compared to the level of the first round of the 2008 polls (41.03%), pretty much the same. Meanwhile, in spite of a possible swing of Angers city from left to right, the proportion of Angers abstainers is well above the national level : 36.45%.

Angers is a rather young city. In 2010, nearly half of the
population (48%) was less than 30 years old and about 30 000 of its inhabitants (all of them are not setlled in Angers) are students, i.e. 20%. All these persons are so born at the internet age, have computers, are used to buy travels, billets, or rent apartments through the net. And, major contradiction in the contemporary period, they have more knowledges about the web than their parents while, for ages, children learnt from their parents.

But the regulations applicable to the polls rule out every options to remote voting, from his home, his place of
weekends or holidays through smartphone, personal computer or even cash dispensers. Every citizen, or every person having a mandate for vote in the name of another one, has to be on the place where he or she is registered. It is possible that such a constraint be unacceptable by persons who, with their mobile phone, do a lot of financial operations as personal and important for them as elections. So the current options of vote could be considered by them as rather archaïc. The abstainers of the reform about voting should think about it.