NO ONE disputes that there was vote fraud in Paris’s 5th arrondissement, not even the principal accused, Jean Tiberi, UMP deputy, former mayor of all Paris, mayor of the 5th arrondissement.
It took 12 years to bring Mr Tiberi (74), his wife Xavière (72) and nine underlings to trial for vote fraud in the 1995 municipal elections and 1997 legislative elections.
In theory, they risk a year in prison and a €15,000 fine, but if the Tiberis are convicted, punishment will be suspended while they appeal. When Jacques Chirac, Mr Tiberi’s mentor, was in power, proceedings kept stalling. The trial, which will end on March 4th, feels like the last gasp of the Chirac era.
On two specific evenings in 1994 and 1997, the file said, the conspirators met in the town hall of the 5th arrondissement, opposite the Pantheon and around the corner from the Irish College, after other employees had gone home.
Voter registration cards were extracted from envelopes marked “no longer lives at this address”. Real cards were used for fake voters, or voters who did not live in the district. Raymond Nentien, the former chief of staff of the town hall, and the Tiberis’ chief accuser, said he found evidence of the first fake voter in 1977: one of Xavière’s Corsican cousins.
“Tiberi was the organiser and initiator of this system of fraud for 20 years. Obviously, all this was done under his orders,” Mr Nentien said this week. The former official said his predecessor alerted him to the practice in 1991, and he realised the true scale of it three years later.
Anne-Marie Affret, the deputy mayor of the 5th, has been clumsy in her defence of the Tiberis. She admitted to drafting false documents and registering voters from other districts at non-existent addresses. “I didn’t decide anything,” Ms Affret said. “Certainly not the fake voters. It existed when I arrived. I continued; that’s all. If there are people who feel responsible, they should say so themselves.”
Mrs Tiberi has accused judges and gendarmes of lying. “There’s a trap. I am certain,” she testified. (The fictitious address of)“373 rue Saint-Jacques was put there to hurt Tiberi. I wonder who wrote it down. It’s like this (name of a fake voter) Shakespeare.”
Gendarmes discovered proof of 196 fake voters between 1994 and 1997, but there were only three gendarmes to investigate more than 40,000 names. Since the case was opened, nearly 6,500 voters have been crossed off the lists. Mr Tiberi has admitted for the first time that voters who did not live in his district voted for him, saying: “Today, I take note of it.” Asked by the judge whose interest the vote fraud served, Mr Tiberi said he didn’t need “this pointless folly” to be elected.
Not true, said Yves Frémion, a regional representative from the Green Party and civil plaintiff.
Mr Tiberi “had a genuine political interest” in rigging votes in the 5th. Mr Frémion insisted that there were “several thousand” fake voters, which “could swing several successive elections”. If the system “had served no purpose, it wouldn’t have stayed in place for decades,” he said.