Witnesses and observers: who actually keeps the election honest?
On voting day: a room, a bureau, voters, and, in a corner, one or two people watching without voting. These are the witnesses. You barely notice them, yet they are the ones who guarantee, from the inside, that the vote is run properly. Who can be one? What can they see? What is their real power? And how does that oversight survive the move to electronic voting? Here are the answers.
Who are the witnesses, and who appoints them?
Witnesses do not come from nowhere. They are appointed by the unions that presented a list of candidates. Each organisation that filed a list can appoint, per polling bureau, one witness and one substitute witness.
The appointment has a precise date: day X+70. It is not a last-minute formality; it sits in the legal calendar, after the bureaus are set up (X+60) and before the vote (day Y).
An often-missed point: only workers of the company can be witnesses. Not a bailiff, not an outside observer, not a delegate from elsewhere. It is a member of staff, and they perform the role during working hours, on their normal pay.
What a witness can see
The witness has oversight of the whole chain of the vote:
- the preparatory operations (setting up the bureau, checking the equipment);
- the vote itself (handing out or sending the ballots, how it runs);
- the counting and the tally of votes.
In other words, they cover the vote from start to finish. Nothing touching the integrity of the vote should, in principle, happen out of their sight.
What a witness can, and cannot, do
This is the distinction that matters, and it is widely misunderstood.
The witness is not part of the polling bureau. The bureau itself is made up of a president, a secretary and four assessors, plus, possibly, the witnesses alongside. So the witness does not take part in the bureau's decisions, does not vote on them, does not handle the ballots.
But they have a real, precise power: they can require their remarks to be recorded in the minutes (the PV), and the president cannot refuse to record them. That is where the strength of the role lies. The witness does not decide, but they leave a written trace of any irregularity they observe. That trace in the minutes is what can, later, ground a challenge before the labour court.
Plainly: the witness is an observer with a right to have things entered in the minutes, not a judge and not a bureau member. Their influence works through transparency, not through voting.
And with electronic voting?
This is the real 2028 question. If the vote happens online, what is left to observe?
Quite a lot, in fact, provided the system is built for it. The witness's role does not disappear, it shifts:
- they attend the opening and closing of the electronic vote (the moments equivalent to opening and sealing the ballot box);
- they check that the announced procedure is the one actually running;
- they attend the counting, here automated, and can have their observations recorded as on paper.
The difference is that oversight no longer rests on what you see with the naked eye in a ballot box, but on what the system makes verifiable: time-stamped event logs, digital seals, end-to-end verifiability mechanisms. A good online voting system gives the witness more to check, not less, it turns "I watch the box" into "I verify the evidence." A bad, opaque system strips the witness of their ability to check: that is exactly what to avoid, and exactly what a serious WC/CPPW agreement should require.
In short
A witness is a worker of the company, appointed on day X+70 by an organisation that presented a list, one titular and one substitute per bureau. They observe everything, preparation, vote, counting, without being part of the bureau or voting on its decisions, but with the right to have their remarks entered in the minutes, which the president cannot refuse. With electronic voting, this oversight does not vanish: it moves toward verifiability, provided you choose a system that makes it possible.
For the full vocabulary of the vote (day X, day Y, bureau, college), read the social elections glossary. And if you want an online voting system that gives your witnesses real oversight, let's talk.
