It popped this morning, a day after word came down that Louisiana’s Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin won’t run for re-election. House Speaker Clay Schexnayder, who has openly flirted with running for governor and parish president in Ascension Parish and everything in between, now says he’s going to run to replace Ardoin…

It’s official: Republican House Speaker Clay Schexnayder is running for Secretary of State. Incumbent Kyle Ardoin announced yesterday that he isn’t seeking reelection. #lalege #lagov pic.twitter.com/wSRAY5rBOS

— Melinda Deslatte (@MelindaDeslatte) April 12, 2023

$900,000 is a pretty good start finance-wise for one of the down-ballot statewide races. Ardoin was said to have only $400,000 in the bank.

As it happens, they have the same campaign consultant, so one would imagine that consultant will be a little more than twice as happy with his new candidate for Secretary of State as he was with his old one.

There is even talk that Schexnayder would keep Ardoin around as the No. 2 man at the Secretary of State’s office were he to win. Ardoin himself shot that down when we talked to him about it, but Camp Schexnayder was spreading it anyway.

Nothing about this is acceptable. It looks very much like the ill-fated machinations the public perceived when then-Gov. Bobby Jindal hired then-congressman Rodney Alexander to run the state veterans’ affairs office and then put state senator Neil Riser into the special election to replace Alexander. Riser was slaughtered by Vance McAllister, a political newcomer who turned out to be an utter disaster, because the voters were so disgusted with what they saw as the inside dealing behind that move.

But this isn’t even a governor making these moves. From appearances it’s a political consultant.

And it’s laughable.

Clay Schexnayder might be the single least impressive major figure in Louisiana politics. We’re more or less positive that the state’s voters, once they’re fully exposed to him (they’re exposed, a little, but let’s face it – nobody really pays attention to the Speaker of the House in the Louisiana legislature), they’ll come to the same conclusion. He’s an awful public speaker, he’s barely literate, he’s shady as can be and he’s one of the most petty individuals who’s ever held that level of power in the Legislature.

But we say he’s unqualified for the job of Secretary of State not just out of a general sense of unfitness. We have a specific reason for saying it.

Which is this: the Secretary of State is in charge of Louisiana’s elections. That means election integrity is a major, perhaps the chief, purview of the Louisiana Secretary of State.

And the number one issue surrounding election integrity – far more so than Dominion voting machines, paper ballots, server farms in Frankfurt or vote-counters in Serbia or Ougadougou or whatever – is millions of dollars in out-of-state money flowing in to corrupt local elections offices in places where a certain political party holds a monopoly on voter registration.

We’re talking about Zuckerbucks. Louisiana isn’t a competitive enough state electorally for that money to flow into presidential or other federal races, at least not yet, but in states thought competitive, hundreds of billions of dollars have flooded in under the guise of “assisting” local elections offices – that money has been used to turn those offices into Democrat get-out-the-vote centers, complete with ballot harvesting and other corrupt practices.

Zuckerbucks has been banned in a whole bunch of red states. It should be banned everywhere. It hasn’t been banned in Louisiana.

Why? Because Clay Schexnayder hasn’t lifted a finger to ban it. He won’t do it because the author of the Zuckerbucks bill the past three years, Rep. Blake Miguez, isn’t one of Schexnayder’s favorites.

He’s let a petty rivalry get in the way of passing legislation we need to protect our democratic system from vote fraud and corruption.

And he wants to be the man in charge of our elections?

Absolutely not.

Clay Schexnayder is such a petty tyrant that he used taxpayer dollars to refurbish the Speaker’s suite at the Pentagon Barracks near the Capitol as a hospitality area, and then he’s held the Speaker’s weekly lunch at times which directly conflict with the House Republican Delegation meetings. Miguez is the chair of the delegation, but it can’t get a quorum to its meetings because Schexnayder creates that conflict every time he tries to have a delegation meeting.

The majority of the delegation didn’t vote for Schexnayder to be Speaker. He knows he has enemies there. Rather than address their concerns he does everything he can to silence them. Conservatives in Schexnayder’s House are second-class citizens, to be treated worse than members of the Legislative Black Caucus without whom Schexnayder couldn’t have been elected Speaker.

And his own heavily-Republican and conservative constituents get screwed in the bargain.

There are other candidates in this race. Public Service Commissioner Mike Francis, who at 76 has been around Louisiana politics for a very long time, has announced his candidacy. Grocery store magnate Brandon Trosclair, who’s run a couple of times, for parish council in Ascension Parish and for the state legislature, but hasn’t won yet, is also an announced candidate. It’s virtually certain that a Democrat will get in.

We can’t say if either Francis or Trosclair are the right man for the job. What we can say is Clay Schexnayder is most certainly not. He doesn’t belong in the state legislature, much less should he get an opportunity to fail up.

Not acceptable. Rejected.