PARIS — Hamze Ghalebi has been an avid follower of French politics ever since he came to Paris as an Iranian political refugee in 2010. He’s paying close attention to the French presidential election — but as a non-citizen, he doesn't have a vote.

Marie Gillier is a French citizen and PhD student whose work with refugees and recent immigrants convinced her that non-citizens should have a chance to be involved in political life in France.

Enter Alter-Votants — a new group that aims to connect French abstentionnistes (citizens who don’t plan to vote) with residents of the country who can’t vote but would like to participate in the election. Alter-Votants put Ghalebi in touch with Gillier, the two met up to discuss the election, and on Sunday Gillier will cast her vote — for the centrist, pro-EU candidate Emmanuel Macron — on Ghalebi’s behalf.

“Political participation is not only about voting once every five years for a president, it’s a lot broader than that,” said Gillier, 24. “Giving my vote to a foreigner — it’s another kind of political participation, but it’s more meaningful than just one vote.”

Alter-Votants sees itself as a response to two major undercurrents of the election campaign. First: immigrants serve as a central scapegoat for the National Front’s Marine Le Pen, but they are unable to cast a vote for or against her. France is home to some 4.4 million residents who aren't French citizens, according to Eurostat.

Second: French pollsters are projecting a potentially record number of abstentions in this election, a dynamic which could benefit Le Pen’s campaign if she makes it to the second round of voting on May 7.

The process for Alter-Votants is simple: the group connects one non-voter with one would-be abstainer and lets the pair take it from there

The process for Alter-Votants is simple: the group connects one non-voter with one would-be abstainer and lets the pair take it from there. There’s no requirement that the participants vote for any particular candidate or even share their preferences when they apply — though the group does try to match people who are ideologically like-minded.

Since the group is just connecting people and not exchanging money or advocating for any particular candidate, the organizers said, their efforts don’t run afoul of French election laws. (If the non-voter and the French citizen ultimately decide they’re not a good match politically, Alter-Votants will connect them with another participant.)

The group is the brainchild of three Parisian twenty-somethings whose work at NGOs put them in frequent contact with refugees and recent immigrants: Rachel, 27; Robert, 29; and Thomas, 27, all of whom asked that their last names not be used because of threats the group has received since its launch in January.

"We are just creating links between two people," says Rachel, when asked if she felt she was circumventing the law. "So for example, I talked about politics with you and it’s not illegal. ... It’s just two people talking about politics in the country in which they live."

'Risked life for politics'

Rachel said their work with refugees and asylum-seekers convinced the group's founders that non-citizens in France — who work here, pay taxes here and are part of their local communities — should have a say in the country's politics.

While it is possible for immigrants and refugees to obtain French citizenship, it’s a complicated process: a foreign national needs to reside in France for at least five consecutive years to be considered, and must also prove that he or she has integrated into French society.

“We all worked sometimes with people who didn’t have the right to vote and who are really involved in politics,” Rachel said over coffee in Montmartre. “Some of them were political refugees. So they risked their life for politics, and nowadays they can’t vote. That’s terrible for them.”

Ghalebi, the Iranian alter-votant, certainly fits that mold. After working for Reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi in Iran’s 2009 presidential election, he was detained and imprisoned for more than two months. Eventually sentenced to five years in prison in Iran, Ghalebi fled to Iraq and then to France, where he’s lived (with a brief detour in the U.S.) since 2010.

“I started to be involved in politics in Iran at age 15 because of an election, so elections and voting are something that really mattered to me,” said Ghalebi, 34.

As the group began receiving attention in local French media, Alter-Votants has received a burst of interest. The organizers have heard from some 800 people, with more responses coming in each day. Thus far they’ve received more requests from people without voting rights than those with voting rights, so they are working to create as many voting pairs as they can, while recruiting more abstainers willing to share their votes.

Online threats

Not everyone, however, agrees with the project’s aims. As the group has grown in visibility, it has also been subjected to online threats and violent messages — particularly after the far-right website Fdesouche drew attention to it. Many of the resulting comments were directed at Gillier, the French woman giving her vote to Ghalebi.

“There were 200 comments in one day and many of them just saying that I should be shot, I should be raped, murdered,” Gillier said. “Every two minutes there was a new comment and directed to me … being a traitor.”

With little time left before the first round of voting, Alter-Votants has been working quickly to create its matches and put people in touch. Natalia, 32, who moved to France 13 years ago from her home country of Colombia and married a French citizen in 2014, saw a post about the group on Facebook and immediately signed up.

In a matter of days, Natalia had been paired with a French voter — a woman who lives in French Guiana, coincidentally, far closer to Natalia’s family in Bogotá.

Natalia said she was motivated to sign up after watching Colombia vote narrowly against its peace accords with the FARC rebel group last fall, as well as the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump in the U.S. In her email to her alter-votant, Natalia described the initiative as a “turning point” for her life in France.

“My frustration is enormous,” she wrote. “The state of the world is worrying, and not having the right to give one’s opinion is a strange sensation.”

Initially, Alter-Votants paired people together arbitrarily as the requests came in. Now, with more attention and more participants, they’re trying to connect people with similar profiles or interests in the hope that they make connections that last beyond election day.

That community aspect seems to be working. Ghalebi’s girlfriend, who is also Iranian, signed up for the initiative — and was matched with Gillier’s brother. The four are planning to meet for dinner in Paris to talk politics in the weeks ahead.