Talk:1958 French constitutional referendum

Dubious
This is the official tally for this referendum, and it says 31066502 yes, 5419749 no. It seems that the Wikipedia article considers the sums of the votes for France and Guinea, whereas Guinea was becoming independent. As far as I know, the votes from Guinea are not taken into account into scholarly commentaries on this vote. David.Monniaux (talk) 07:36, 29 July 2009 (UTC)


 * If Guinea had voted "Yes" then I suspect it would have been included in the official totals. But given earlier election results there, the "No" was probably not unexpected. At the time of the referendum it seems to have had the same status as other parts of French West Africa apart from French Togoland and French Cameroon. --Rumping (talk) 15:58, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

According to Anne Stevens in "Government and Politics of France" the figures are 85.14% yes, 14.85% no. This is a reliable source, I would suggest a change to these figures. Or at least someone fill in an explination on the page (i.e. give two sets of figures, on including Guinea, one not). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.67.169.115 (talk) 20:22, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

Figures in tables and sources
The figures in the table are inconsistent and include an obvious arithmetical error.

31,123,483 	 6,556,073  418,297

do not add up to the total shown of 38,097,483. So we do have to do something, and my amendments were just my attempt to do that.

The source of the official French figures does allow to see the correct total, and shows the figures for metropolitan France. The figures for French Guinea are shown in the source and are included in the overall totals shown above.

The official French source can be found at

It might be better to only give this source, as the Nohlen & Stover source is less accessible, and the information in the Direct Democracy source, while accessible, contains several data errors.

I hope that you will have a look at the sources and get back to me with a suggestion of how we can proceed to improve this article, and not dismiss suggestions for changes without first exploring constructively the reasons and arguments for the suggestions, so that when possible we proceed by consensus.

Looking forward to positive responses,

Redhill54 (talk) 21:25, 25 June 2022 (UTC)
 * It seems there was simply a typo in the total figure in the table, which I have corrected to have the right total according to the Nohlen & Stöver source, which I have in front of me. It should have been 38,097,853	not 38,097,483. Number   5  7  21:58, 25 June 2022 (UTC)

Differences in data in different sources
Hi to all,

At the moment I am not in a position to investigate the differences in the figures for this referendum result, but do hope by the end of 2022 to assemble data from enough sources to see what the issues are, and how quite different numbers can be quoted for one set of events. I am writing this to give other editors notice that we are going to have to have a look at more than one source, and more than one set of figures.

For example, one of the questions is sorting out what are the correct numbers for abstentions and blank/void votes in St Pierre and Miquelon. The figures are quite small compared to other questions, but we do need to get all of the figures correct, not just the large ones.

The much larger figures to check and examine do include the questions raised about the votes from Guinea, which definitely formed part of the electorate for the referendum, and therefore must be included in a correct set of total figures. The independence of Guinea was a result of the vote, and did not happen before it. There are quite a few other differences and discrepancies in the figures for the referendum, and the differences between the figures in different sources is certainly going to be tricky to sort out.

If we can reach a consensus on a single source of data, or the majority of authoritative sources, it should be easier to arrive at a stable result, but no-one should assume as of now that they already have found a position and worked with others to make it a consensus position. I certainly do not make that assumption about the sources I already know about, and so look forward to working this out with all of you.

There are articles on this subject in 12 different languages, so we certainly should try to achieve a consensus result in English and French before suggesting any amendments needed in the other 10.

To start off there are three different source references with different sets of figures in the current English-language and French-language Wikipedia articles, which I show here if anyone wishes to examine them. By the end of 2022 I hope to have found more sources to add, but at least these three sources do illustrate what I was talking about above.

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000000571394

Elections in Europe: A data handbook by Dieter Nohlen & Philip Stöver (2010) ISBN 978-3-8329-5609-7

http://www.sudd.ch/event.php?lang=en&id=fr011958

Look forward to coming back to this when I have found and examined more sources and data.

Redhill54 (talk) 13:53, 6 September 2022 (UTC)