French absentee voters scramble to have their say in high-stakes election

Hundreds of thousands of absentee voters have made requests to hand their voting rights to loved ones for France’s high-stakes election (Ludovic Marin/AP)

Voters who do not expect to be able to cast ballots themselves are scrambling to make their voices heard in France’s high-stakes legislative election by signing up in their hundreds of thousands to hand their voting rights to loved ones and friends.

The Interior Ministry said on Tuesday that it counted 410,000 such requests in the first week after President Emmanuel Macron’s announcement on June 9 that he was dissolving France’s National Assembly, parliament’s lower house.