One French town is ditching paper ballots for 2026, using voting machines banned almost everywhere else

In most of France, Election Day still looks like a civics-class postcard: stacks of paper ballots, an envelope, a ballot box, and a hand count that can stretch late into the night.

But in Les Herbiers, a town of about 12,000 registered voters in western France, none of that happens. When residents pick their local leaders on March 15 and March 22, 2026, they’ll vote on electronic machines instead of paper ballots, making Les Herbiers the only municipality in its department, Vendée, to use the system.

The town has stuck with voting machines for more than two decades, pitching them as faster and less wasteful, saving the equivalent of about 100,000 sheets of paper, according to city hall. Yet the setup also spotlights the tradeoffs that come with electronic voting: transparency, public trust, and strict government rules that keep the technology rare nationwide.

A rare holdout in a country that still counts by hand

France is not a country that embraced electronic voting. The overwhelming majority of its cities and towns still rely on paper ballots and manual counting, with volunteers sorting and tallying votes at long tables.

Les Herbiers is an outlier, and not just locally. Across all of France, only 63 municipalities are authorized to use voting machines, covering about 1.3 million voters, roughly 3% of the electorate. Some are sizable cities, like Brest and Mulhouse, while others are smaller communities. The common thread isn’t population, it’s local history and political choice, under a tight national rulebook.

In Vendée, a largely rural coastal department roughly comparable to a U.S. county in day-to-day governance (though France’s administrative structure is different), Les Herbiers stands alone. Drive a few miles outside town and you’re back to paper ballots and hand counts.

How voting works when there’s no ballot, no envelope, and no ballot box

The basics are familiar: voters show up at their usual polling place, prove their identity, and sign the voter rolls afterward. What changes is the act of voting itself.

Instead of stepping into a booth to pick up and seal a paper ballot, voters use a machine. They select a candidate by pressing the number tied to that candidate, then hit a “validate” button that locks in the choice. That confirmation step is the point of no return, once it’s validated, the vote can’t be changed.

City officials emphasize a key reassurance: the machines aren’t connected to the internet or any network. Votes are stored on a physical cartridge, described locally as a “cassette”, and results are extracted after polls close. In other words, it’s not online voting. It’s electronic recording.

To reduce confusion at the machine, the town provides instructions in advance and requires explanatory posters at polling places, including a replica of the on-screen interface. The goal is to keep the process understandable without assistance, because needing help inside the voting area can raise concerns about secrecy and influence.

France’s strict rules: only 63 towns, and just one machine per polling place

Unlike in the U.S., where election rules vary widely by state and even county, France sets national standards for how voting machines can be used, and the standards are restrictive.

Only a limited list of municipalities can deploy the machines at all. And even then, the government caps each polling place at a single machine. A town also doesn’t have to equip every polling location, but if it doesn’t, officials must clearly inform voters ahead of time to avoid confusion on Election Day.

That one-machine limit creates a real-world bottleneck. If voters arrive in waves, before work, at lunch, after dinner, lines can build quickly. The promise of speed depends as much on logistics and voter familiarity as it does on the technology itself.

The pitch: less paper, faster results, if the lines don’t back up

Les Herbiers’ leaders sell the system on two main benefits: cutting paper use and speeding up results. The paper savings, they say, amount to about 100,000 sheets that don’t need to be printed, distributed, restocked, and discarded after the election.

And because there’s no traditional hand count of individual ballots, results can come in sooner, with fewer opportunities for human counting errors and less late-night strain on poll workers and volunteers.

But the tradeoff is front-end friction. If voters hesitate at the machine, especially first-timers, infrequent voters, or older residents unfamiliar with the interface, the time saved on the back end can be lost in the line.

The bigger question: what “transparency” looks like without paper

The core debate isn’t whether the machines connect to the internet, they don’t, according to the town. It’s whether the public feels the process is as visible and verifiable as paper.

With paper ballots, observers can literally watch votes being sorted into piles and recounted if needed. With a machine, transparency shifts to procedure: verifying IDs, ensuring the machine is used correctly, confirming the vote is validated, signing the rolls, and monitoring how results are extracted at closing time.

For some voters, that’s enough. For others, the absence of a physical ballot can feel like a leap of faith, especially in an era when election security is a political flashpoint well beyond France.

Les Herbiers shows electronic voting can become routine when a community lives with it long enough. But the fact that France has kept the practice confined to a tiny slice of the electorate suggests the country’s election officials still see paper as the simplest, most universally understood, and most easily audited, standard.