Election results in our area

This might be a little dry and boring, so I'll put in some nice pictures of flowers to dress it up. That'll cheer me up too. We are having a gray, rainy, breezy day. It's not cold, but we can't really do anything outdoors.

I was just looking at the French presidential election results by département. The départements are the closest thing we have to counties in France. They are grouped into administrative régions.

In our department, the Loir-et-Cher, 56% of the vote went to Nicolas Sarkozy, the winner, and 44% went to Ségolène Royal. That means our department is slightly more pro-Sarkozy than France as a whole.

The statistics show that about 85.5% of the 250,500 registered voters in our department actually went to the polls. That means 200,000 voted. About 10,000 of those, or 5%, cast blank ballots.

In our village (pop. 1,100), there are 847 registered voters. Of those, 714 went and voted: 52 cast blanks, 351 voted for Sarkozy, and 311 voted for Royal. In other words, in our village Nicolas Sarkozy got 53%, and Ségolène Royal got 47% of the actual votes, which is exactly what the two candidates got in France as a whole.

The town of Saint-Aignan has 2,230 registered voters. Eighty-one percent of them went to the polls, and they also voted 53% to 47% in favor of Nicolas Sarkozy.

In the neighboring department called the Indre (part of the old province called the Berry), which is more rural and probably a little poorer than the Loir-et-Cher, there are 175,000 registered voters. There, Ségolène Royal actually came in ahead of Nicolas Sarkozy, but just by a hair (she got 50.17% of the vote).

In the other neighboring department, the Indre-et-Loire (aka La Touraine), which includes the big city of Tours, there are about 400,000 registered voters. There, Sarkozy got a little less than 53% and Royal got a little more than 47%.

Saint-Aignan is just at the border of three departments. We can drive 10 km (6 mi.) south or 10 km east and cross into a different department. But the northern edge of our department, the Loir-et-Cher, is a couple of hours away by car. So we really are at the center of an area that is divided into three departments.

Callie sleeping under the edge of the bed


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