Here’s Why We Weren’t On Board With That Emergency Elections Plan

It wasn’t the end of the world, but that plan passed by the Louisiana legislature to allow expanded mail-in balloting for the July and August elections in Louisiana, during which nothing of any great import will be decided, was a bad idea. And we said so.

One reason we didn’t like the plan was that we weren’t convinced by the argument that if Louisiana didn’t put forth some sort of emergency election program the state would get sued, and the case would end up in the 19th Judicial District Court wherein there’s a judicial roulette wheel working that could land you in front of someone like Janice Clark or Trudy White. While that is certainly true, and while a Clark, White or Wilson Fields would be exceedingly likely to put Democrat politics in front of the law and make some sort of extralegal ruling requiring the state to allow full-on mail-in balloting none of that would hold up on appeal.

We also didn’t like that argument because we’ve been pretty sure from the start that there would be left-wing groups funded by the George Soros types with out-of-state money who would sue the state attempting to create a full-on mail-in balloting regime no matter what Louisiana did, so why give these people an inch?

Yesterday, we were more or less proven right. The lawsuit is actually in federal court rather than state court, but all of the underlying assumptions are the same.

The NACCP, Power Coalition for Equity and Justice and four individual voters are filing a federal lawsuit in response to Louisiana’s emergency election plan, which they say places unfair limitations on the expansion of mail-in voting.

According to The Advocate the lawsuit, which calls the plan “unduly restrictive,” is aimed at removing the requirements that force voters to present an excuse to receive an absentee ballot, and instead, expand mail-in voting opportunities to all voters.

“Risking your health, and the health of your family, should not be a requirement to partake in the electoral process,” Catherine Meza, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said in a statement. “We are hoping this lawsuit not only increases access to absentee voting but also makes in-person voting safer, so that Louisianans can exercise their constitutional right without putting their lives at risk.”

The lawsuit also asks for other rules on absentee ballots to be suspended and for early voting to be expanded, among other things, all while the coronavirus pandemic is ongoing in Louisiana. The lawsuit argues the election plan would particularly impact black voters, because the virus has taken a disproportionate toll on minorities.

The plan crafted by Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin last month for the delayed July and August elections originally featured several reasons voters could use to obtain a mail-in ballot and avoid voting in person, including a fear of transmitting or catching the virus.

But Republican lawmakers, aided by Attorney General Jeff Landry, fought back against the expansion, echoing claims by President Donald Trump that such an expansion would invite fraud. Election experts and studies have repeatedly found voter fraud is extremely rare.

Governor John Bel Edwards supported the plan, which passed both chambers of the Legislature in late April.

It’s probably even more likely this suit will hit paydirt at the district level in federal court in Baton Rouge, as all three federal judges in the Middle District of Louisiana can be said to be “Obama judges” – John deGravelles and Shelly Dick are actual Obama appointments, and Brian Jackson, a Clinton appointment, is even more reliably partisan. But if the state appeals to the Fifth Circuit the state will win.

It’s not established that Louisiana will still be in a state of emergency in July or August such that an emergency elections plan will even be necessary.

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The point is that Louisiana was going to be sued by left-wing nuts attempting to destroy the integrity of our elections no matter what we did, and the result was going to be the same. Giving ground to these people without demanding equal or greater concessions from their side is a mistake and shouldn’t be done.

Nobody cares about the July and August elections. If there is expanded mail-in balloting in those it won’t do any real damage. But long-term, a state with Louisiana’s history of electoral shenanigans simply cannot put the New Orleans Post Office in charge of ballot security without risking disaster. We have confidence that Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin, Attorney General Jeff Landry and majorities in the state legislature know this, and we’re almost certain that HB 419, the bill brought by Louisiana’s Face-Mask Barbie, freshman Democrat representative Mandie Landry, to throw open the state’s elections to unrestricted mail-in balloting will fail in the House & Governmental Affairs Committee. And that will be the end of any notion that mail-fraud elections will take hold in Louisiana before this fall’s presidential contest.

But the lesson here is these leftist groups like the NAACP and the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice are funded for the specific purpose of causing as much trouble to established systems as possible in an effort to break down fundamental institutions, and they can’t be appeased. To the extent that the emergency elections plan was thrown together as an effort at doing so, it was always doomed – and this lawsuit proves it.

Don’t ever stop fighting these people. They’ll never stop fighting you.

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