Geoffroy Van Der Hasselt, AFP | The French voted in the left-wing primary for the 2017 French presidential election, on January 22, 2017

French media on Monday raised doubts over the results for the first round of the left-wing primaries, saying the lack of information about the turnout suggests the vote count might be erroneous. Organisers dismissed the allegations.

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French newspaper Le Monde questioned the results after having compared the turnout communicated by the election’s organisers at 12.45am – some six hours after the country’s polling stations closed on Sunday evening – with the numbers published on the official website later on Monday morning. According to the daily, “the percentage of votes [for each candidate] remains more or less identical, but the number of votes is no longer the same. To be more precise, there are 352,013 more,” it wrote.

“How is it possible for the number of votes to increase without it affecting the distribution [of votes]?” it asked.

Christophe Borgel, president of the committee organising the primaries, told newspaper Libération: “There was a [technical] bug, that’s all. And it’s a little bit my fault. There was a lot of pressure when it came to the turnout numbers. I asked for the results to be updated as quickly as possible and, in effect, we used the same percentage when renewing the number of total voters.”

Thomas Clay, the head of the high authority of the left group of parties (la Haute Autorité de la primaire de la gauche) being represented in the vote, responded to Le Monde’s allegations by insisting that the numbers linked to the turnout had in no way been inflated and that the results had been “coherent” ever since officials announced the first projection on Sunday evening.

The results of the first round of the left-wing primary, published by organisers on Monday January 23, 2017, at 10am

Clay said that “all the results, polling station by polling station, district by district” will be published on the official website as soon as all the votes had been counted. “Everything will be perfectly transparent.”

“There are still votes from 400 polling stations that haven’t been processed [due to] technical reasons, not fraudulent reasons."

According to Le Monde, it is unlikely that the 352,013 votes that were suddenly added to the results at 12.45am on Monday have been processed – despite the fact that the organisers presented them as such.

The newspaper also speculated whether “these votes don’t exist, that it has to do with an artificial addition to inflate the turnout number”.

The paper did not rule out “a statistical miracle”, however, in which the votes had in fact been processed and that the result of them perfectly mirrored the previous percentages allocated to the different candidates.

“I don’t understand why there is even a discussion about the turnout. It is exactly in line with what was announced last night,” Clay told the AFP news agency.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

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