Absentee voters in France scramble to make their voices heard in high-stakes legislative election

By JOHN LEICESTER
Associated Press

PARIS (AP) — Voters who don’t expect to be able to cast ballots themselves are scrambling to make their voices heard in France’s high-stakes legislative election. They’re signing up in their hundreds of thousands to hand their voting rights to loved ones and friends. The Interior Ministry said Tuesday that it counted 410,000 such requests in the first week after French President Emmanuel Macron’s shock June 9 announcement that he was dissolving France’s National Assembly, parliament’s lower house. That bombshell followed a humbling defeat by the far-right National Rally party in European Parliament elections. The ministry said the number is 6.5 times more than it registered for the same week-long period in the last legislative elections in 2022.