Fact check: Did Marine Le Pen secure more votes than Emmanuel Macron during the second round of France’s election in 2022?

After the election in France and Emmanuel Macron won the President’s seat by defeating Marine Le Pen. There have been many controversies revolving around them on social media. French crowd welcomed the new president with tomatoes when he made his first public appearance. Meanwhile, a claim is going viral on social media about the result of the elections.

David Kurten a verified account on Twitter, shared a small clip regarding the number of votes gained by the candidates. He raised a question of how Marine Le Pen who was in the lead during the counting went down by a decent margin.

How is it possible that the number of votes counted for Marine le Pen went down from 14.4m during the live count to 13.3m at the declaration? https://t.co/UBmOR5A8sZ

— David Kurten (@davidkurten) April 25, 2022

Many other users also shared a snapshot of the live streaming of the election and claimed that initially Marine Le Pen was in lead but at the last minute Emmanuel won.

https://twitter.com/Analemme84/status/1518440045061025792?s=20&t=eF9ZP6_HCP0oKwxpZvFU6A

Ok, this is ODD👇🏻
How can Marine Le Pen end up with LESS votes in the final result than she had while voting was still going on??! pic.twitter.com/ucEnCmHnjj

— Nat (@Arwenstar) April 25, 2022

Macron was behind 217,571 votes. He won 30 minutes later. Am I the only one that have seen this movie before? pic.twitter.com/2zSY7aZ8Gq

— Ole T-S (@Ole_TS_) April 25, 2022

In short, users are sharing the count where at the last minute of the voting during elections, Marine Le Pen has secured more votes than the current president Macron

Fact check

After cross-checking, we found a tweet from Info France 2, which is a French public national television channel. The channel apologized for the computer error which lead to the error in numbers during the live streaming of the election 2022.

Erratum : une erreur informatique nous a amenés à afficher des chiffres erronés lors de la soirée électorale de France 2, dimanche 24 avril. Nous prions nos téléspectateurs de nous en excuser. Voici quelques explications ⤵️

— Info France 2 (@infofrance2) April 25, 2022

Therefore, the claim is misleading as it all took place due to an error on the computer screen.