France Presidential Election 2017 Live Results: Find Up-To-Date Voting Totals From French Election
The France 2017 presidential election is underway, and those looking for live results will have a few places to turn to find up-to-date voting totals in the race between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen.
Polls close at 8 p.m. local time (5 p.m. GMT/2 p.m. ET) in France, with the vote tallies continuing to come in through the evening. A link to live voting results can be found below.
As The Guardian noted, the French presidential election pits two candidates with very different visions for the nation’s future.
“Macron, a 39-year-old former banker and economy minister running as an independent centrist, is economically liberal, socially progressive, globally minded and upbeat,” the report noted. “Le Pen is a nation-first protectionist who wants to close France’s borders and possibly leave the euro and the EU.”
The contentious race for France’s president turned even more controversial late in the week when a hacking group released a massive amount of campaign documents from Macron’s camp, one that came as France was under a mandatory media blackout on the election. The release mirrored an attack on American presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and matters were complicated with reports that there were some fake documents mixed in with Macron’s campaign emails.
There are reports that the Macron camp may have intentionally muddled the hacking attempt by feeding in false information to make it more difficult for hackers to determine what they found in the emails, The Daily Beast noted.
“You can flood these [phishing] addresses with multiple passwords and log-ins, true ones, false ones, so the people behind them use up a lot of time trying to figure them out,” Mounir Mahjoubi, the head of Macron’s digital team, told The Daily Beast in a previous story on hacking attempts.
American alt-right and Twitter bots are key to spreading French election hack. https://t.co/YPszvYB3e0 pic.twitter.com/brVQ6aRVLZ
— Slate (@Slate) May 6, 2017
It is believed that the hackers are attempting to create confusion and distrust around Macron’s campaign and that it could lead some voters to stay home. The early live results from the France 2017 presidential election shows that may be the case, with voter turnout lower than this point in the 2012 election.
Voter turnout for French presidential runoff at midday was 28.23 pt, slightly lower than round 1 and below 2012 & 2007 #frenchelection2017
— Henry Samuel (@H_E_Samuel) May 7, 2017
As The Guardian noted, it’s likely that turnout will remain low through the entirety of voting in the French presidential election.
“Up to a quarter of the electorate is expected to abstain, with some supporters of the centre-right candidate François Fillon and the hard-left veteran Jean-Luc Mélenchon, both defeated in the first round on 23 April, saying they would not be voting for either candidate,” the report noted.
Both Macron and Le Pen are forbidden from speaking about the leak, and major news organizations have said they will not report on it at the time, especially given the massive size of documents released.
Le Monde, the nation’s largest newspaper, noted that it could not be reporting on the Macron leak until it had proper time to review all the documents.
“If these documents contain revelations, Le Monde will, of course, publish them after having investigated them, respecting our journalistic and ethical rules, and without allowing ourselves to be exploited by the publishing calendar of anonymous actors,” the paper said.
The French Election, in Pictures https://t.co/bSuw1mCkBO
— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 7, 2017
Those who follow live results from the France 2017 presidential election are likely to see Emmanuel Macron in the lead. After a very heated debate this week, Macron was able to build his lead in nationwide polls to more than 20 points over Marine Le Pen.
But after surprise victories for Brexit last summer and Donald Trump in November — after both had been trailing in polls — experts are not counting out Marine Le Pen as the nation goes to vote on Sunday.
Those who want to follow live results from the France 2017 presidential election can click here for up-to-date voting totals from Politico.
[Featured Image by Sylvain Lefevre/Getty Images]
