Secretary of state wants absentee ballot restrictions, despite lack of voter fraud • Louisiana Illuminator

Louisiana’s top election official wants to restrict how voters can obtain and submit forms to request absentee ballots, along with limits on who may assist voters with the ballots themselves. 

Secretary of State Nancy Landry is behind what she’s called a “election integrity legislative package,” although she and her predecessor, Kyle Ardoin, have affirmed Louisiana has not seen any instances of widespread voter fraud. 

One of the proposals in Landry’s package is Senate Bill 218, sponsored by Sen. Caleb Kleinpeter, R-Port Allen. It would make it a criminal offense to give an absentee ballot application form to two or more people who are not immediate family members. It would also make it a crime to place application forms in a mailbox or deliver them by any other means to a parish registrar for two or more people who aren’t immediate relatives. 

The Senate passed the bill in a 26-10 floor vote Wednesday, sending it to the House for consideration. 

A provision in the bill would require parish registrars to record the name, address and relationship of any person providing assistance to a voter during an early voting period and whether the helper was being paid to provide the assistance. 

The prohibition would apply to the application form voters have to fill out just to request an absentee ballot. Those forms are available for the public to save and print from the Louisiana Secretary of State’s website and can be delivered by hand, mail or fax to the parish registrar’s office. A separate proposal advancing through the Legislature would enact a similar ban on delivering the actual absentee ballots themselves.

To win support for his bill, Kleinpeter referenced footage of individuals reportedly delivering ballots on behalf of a state lawmaker’s campaign but later softened on his allegations.

“We have them on video collecting a lot of ballots and going and dropping them off at the post office,” Kleinpeter told the committee.

He later acknowledged to the Illuminator the video did not show any evidence of crimes being committed because it is not illegal to bring absentee ballots to a post office. His bill, if enacted, would make such activity illegal.

Kleinpeter’s bill would also effectively prohibit assisted living facilities, retirement communities and other group homes from providing application forms to their residents and placing them in a mailbox.  

Sen. Sam Jenkins, D-Shreveport, said it doesn’t make sense to prohibit an assisted living facility from simply giving the applications to their residents, many of whom are elderly and unable to print the form from the secretary of state’s website. Offering a form to someone shouldn’t be conflated with filling it out or helping fill it out, he said. 

Sherri Hadsky, the secretary of state’s commissioner of elections, said her office typically receives calls from people who complain facility staff members or other non-relatives assisted their family member with an absentee ballot.   

“We don’t receive calls from people who say, ‘I can’t vote because I don’t have anyone to assist me,’” Hadsky said.

Landry, who testified in support of Kleinpeter’s bill, said allowing unknown individuals to collect unlimited numbers of ballot applications would give them access to the voter’s name and address and therefore allow them to “harass and intimidate voters” into voting a certain way. 

Louisiana legislation targets mail-in absentee voting as it gains in popularity

Landry said it’s impossible to track ballot requests that third parties collect before they reach a registrar’s office. 

“We have no way of knowing if the individual is harvesting them, recording personal information from these applications or simply discarding them in a garbage receptacle somewhere,” she said. “This bill would allow us to go after those who may be trying to take advantage of our most vulnerable citizens.” 

In an emailed statement, Landry’s office cited three incidents involving election fraud misdemeanors in Louisiana. Nearly all of them involved politicians from a single small town — and none revealed evidence of widespread wrongdoing among voters. 

Perhaps the most notable case in Louisiana was a vote-buying scheme in Amite City during the 2016 and 2020 elections. A handful of local officials from multiple towns in Tangipahoa Parish — most of whom were Democrats or independents — were convicted on federal charges stemming from the scheme in which they paid people up to $20 to entice them to vote. They were accused of tampering only with local elections, but the ballots at that time included candidates for federal office, prompting the federal charges. They received minor sentences, ranging from probation to up to one year in prison. 

Another occurred in a 2018 local election in Acadia Parish when a woman assisting two elderly voters allegedly failed to mark their absentee ballots as directed. Delores “Dee” Handy of Crowley was convicted on a single misdemeanor charge and received two years probation. 

A third incident occurred in 2020, when Amite City Councilman Emmanuel Zanders, a Democrat, allegedly wrote false addresses on two voter registration forms. He ultimately pleaded guilty to one count of election fraud and received six months unsupervised probation. 

Then-Attorney General Jeff Landry, who’s not related to Nancy Landry, made a spectacle of the case when he held a press conference to announce the charges. It took place during the height of Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Landry held his press conference on Jan. 6, 2021, the same day of the insurrection launched by a mob of Trump supporters who assaulted police at the U.S. Capitol in a violent attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Louisiana is already “very generous” with the excuses people can use to vote absentee, Nancy Landry has said. 

She repeated those arguments during a March 21 House and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on House Bill 506, sponsored by Rep. Polly Thomas, R-Metairie. Thomas’ bill would require voter registration groups to first register with the Louisiana Secretary of State before holding any registration drives. 

During last year’s election, a group failed to turn in several dozen registration forms for high school students who learned about the gaffe when they showed up to vote and were told they had never been registered. The forms were later found. A volunteer from the group that held the registration drive had left them in the trunk of someone’s car and forgot to turn them in, Nancy Landry said.

Requiring groups to register with the secretary of state would allow election officials to keep track of voter drives and contact volunteers to make sure they fill out forms correctly and turn them in, according to the Secretary of State. 

The House passed Thomas’ bill Wednesday in a 73-27 vote and transferred it to the Senate for consideration.