Early voting for the May 16 election began Saturday with confusion over whether all the races listed on the ballot are still taking place.
Even motivated voters who showed up within the first few hours said they weren’t quite sure whether the U.S. House elections were still happening.
Republican Gov. Jeff Landry suspended the U.S. House races Thursday, a day after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Louisiana’s House district map unconstitutional.
Republican Secretary of State Nancy Landry has said votes cast in Louisiana’s U.S. House races won’t be counted. But that didn’t deter several early voters from picking a House candidate on their ballot anyway.
Mail-in ballots with U.S. House races listed had already been sent out by the time the governor declared the election was off. Nancy Landry’s office also didn’t have enough notice to remove the affected candidates’ names from the ballots before in-person voting started.
Gov. Landry’s move to postpone an election for a reason other than a natural disaster or health crisis is highly unusual, if not unprecedented, in Louisiana.
The state has proceeded with U.S. House races after federal courts declared the voting districts unconstitutional in the past, most recently in 2022. Previously, officials agreed it was too close to the elections to change the map, and that new districts could wait until the following cycle two years later.
But Landry and other Republican officials insist the Supreme Court decision from last Wednesday is so sweeping in nature that it demands the aggressive action of calling off an election, even when absentee voting was already underway.
The Supreme Court declared Louisiana’s current House map unconstitutional because it said state officials relied too heavily on the race of voters to draw its district boundaries. As a result, Landry and Republican legislators are expected to create a new map that would eliminate one, or both, of the state’s majority- Black districts.
Calling off the current elections allows the governor and Republican state lawmakers to draw up new, more conservative U.S. House districts sooner.
A flurry of lawsuits have been filed in federal and state court attempting to stop the governor’s actions and keep Louisiana’s House races moving forward. So far, none have been successful, but more court decisions could be handed down in the next few days.
In light of that uncertainty, U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican whose contentious reelection campaign is on the same ballot, was among those who chose to still pick a candidate in a House race when he went to early vote this week.
Cassidy said he wasn’t convinced a court would uphold Landry’s decision to call off the election and wanted to vote just in case.
The senator said he agreed with the Supreme Court ruling on the U.S. House districts, but he was uncomfortable with the decision to cancel those races less than 48 hours before early voting began.
