Abstract
Drawing on a representative sample of nearly 40,000 registered voters in France, the article measures, for the first time at the national scale, the magnitude of voter “misregistration” — being registered to vote but not at current or main residence address — and the sociological characteristics of the phenomenon. Six and half million persons eligible to vote in the country’s 2012 national elections were misregistered; i.e., they had not re-registered at their new address after moving. The largest groups in this situation are highly mobile — notably students and senior managers; being misregistered undermines their predisposition to vote. Analysis of individual voting records finds that voters not registered in the municipality they reside in are three times more likely than others to abstain consistently.