30 minutes. 26 exactly. That is to say six times less than it takes to go from Republic to Nation during a protest. Ten times less than it takes to run a stand on animal abuse at a punk rock concert. Fifty times less than it takes to find emergency accommodation for a family of haggard Eritreans picked up on the side of a railway track near Ventimille. A hundred times less than it takes to find the articles of the Labor Code capable of solidifying the defense of an employee suspended for supposedly serious misconduct. Two hundred times less than it takes to obtain a negotiation with management in the context of a social conflict at the Gueugnon call center. Ten thousand times less than is needed to make an eco-hamlet viable. Infinite times less than it takes to ban the commercialization of digital data.  Voting offers an unrivaled time-reward ratio. In less than an hour, I accomplished my sacred duty. It doesn’t cost much, as Sarkozy said of his position against gay marriage intended to flirt with the Catholic branch. It doesn’t eat bread, my grandmother would have said, who voted as scrupulously all her life as she served dinner to her husband. […]

In the election itself, the expression doubles in volume. The ballot can contain 10 letters, sometimes 15, or even 20 in the frequent case where the candidate’s surname has particles. But this surname says nothing, nor the support given to it. There are fifty shades of support for Dumoulin, candidate for the municipal elections in Brie-en-Gueugnon. Someone adheres to her charisma, someone to her promise to take control of the Water Authority, someone to her commitment to doubling the subsidy to the badminton club that she runs, someone to her ch’tis origins, someone to her husban, professor of applied mathematics, one in her project to pedestrianize the Halles district, one in her desire to rename the Poivre d’Arvor college, another in her name because he likes mills. The bulletin can mean all that and therefore says nothing. This silence leaves the elected official an infinite margin of interpretation as to what is expected of him, a margin of deafness to the voices expressed in his favor.

In 2002, myriads of naive people hoped that during his mandate Chirac would take into account those who, among his voters in the second round, had only wanted to block the path to Le Pen. But nothing forced him to. The leader of the right was constitutionally free to interpret the ballots in his favor as he wished. Nothing distinguishes a Chirac bulletin approving his liberal-authoritarian program from an anti-racist Chirac bulletin. It was open to the new elected official to decide that 100% of the 80% obtained had wanted, not a better reception of foreign workers, but the increase in the retirement age that the National Assembly under orders would soon implement.

He is free to believe that 82% of voters declared their love for him. Dedicated to his party, the UMP. Validated his new glasses. No one could have assured him, based on the vote, that he was wrong. Seeing his five-year term heading to the right, the naive people were even more naive to feel cheated. How could the president betray an expectation that had not been expressed? As such, all the ballots could be declared invalid, even the immaculate ones, even those that no ill-mannered person has soiled with an Amy Taylor president, as a friend did at the 2021 European elections. A bulletin says nothing. The election reduces citizenship to expression, and this expression says nothing.