Some surprising news came out of the Republican State Central Committee meeting that was held this past Saturday.  That news is regarding paper ballots.  It was reported that the RSCC passed a resolution to request that Louisiana go back to a paper ballot system.  This is very short-sighted and just an all-around really bad idea.

The fact that this resolution passed was a surprise to most.  Before the meeting, the RSCC members that I talked to seemed convinced that the people pushing the paper ballot resolution were a vocal minority.  They had been pushing this issue for some time without seeming to gain much traction.  Sadly, I had several RSCC members tell me that there was a lot of coercion (some of them said threats) being employed by the paper ballot crowd prior to the meeting.  It ended up going to a secret ballot where it reportedly passed by a 79-77 margin.  Sadly, it seems likely that the coercion was successful.

I will admit that after the 2020 election, the paper ballot movement held an attraction for me.  But then I learned a couple of amazing facts.  Firstly, while Louisiana is last in most rankings, there is one thing that we do well.  That is how we run our elections.  The proof is in the pudding.  Just look at election night results and the days following the election.  We always know who won within a couple of hours of polls closing, and there is seldom any controversy.  When there is a controversy, it is usually caused by paper ballots rather than something that would be fixed by them.  Some other states take days or weeks to determine election results.  Secondly, paper ballots are the problem, not the solution.  This is seen time and time again.

The paper ballot push stems from the 2020 election when every manner of irregularity was reported all around the country and we got stuck with Joe Biden as the 46^th president.  There were absolutely many questions about that election that have never been sufficiently answered in my opinion.  The problem with this resolution is that most of the issues in that election were due to the expansion of paper, absentee and mail-in ballots, and not related to electronic votes.  This resolution conveniently ignores that fact.

I will acknowledge that there are questions about certain northern states that added thousands of votes between midnight and 4AM.  And I have never seen an explanation that sounds viable to me.  But a much bigger problem was the expansion of paper ballots, mail -in ballots, unattended ballot drop-boxes, etc.  Interestingly, none of the electronic voting machine issues were reported in Louisiana.  So why should we change what we are doing?

Let me be clear.  Louisiana will not be going to paper ballots.  It is simply not going to happen.  We have an excellent secretary of state in Nancy Landry.  She knows her job, and she knows what a complete disaster paper ballots would be.  This resolution by the RSCC will change absolutely nothing regarding how we run our elections.  But that is not to say that it will not have any effect, because it will.  What it does is undermine Nancy Landry and hurt her credibility.  She is in the midst of purchasing new election machines for the state, and now her own party is now speaking out against what she is doing.  That is not a good look, for her or for the Republican Party.

Now, to the  party’s credit, they did revise this resolution to something that was more palatable and allowed electronic machines that produced a paper receipt for audit purposes, but make no mistake that the intent of the group behind it was to move the state in the direction of paper ballots.

I would be willing to bet that the people pushing these paper ballots don’t really know how elections are run in our state.  If they had ever actually sat down and spent hours counting a few hundred paper ballots and seen all the problem ballots where people vote for two candidates, don’t sign ballots, don’t have them witnessed, didn’t fill in the circle correctly, etc., they would want no part of paper ballots. Paper ballots greatly increase the amount of human error in the voting process, and humans make LOTS of errors. Meanwhile, the electronic votes are seamless.  The issues that do occur in Louisiana elections are almost always caused by paper ballots, so they certainly will not be fixed with more paper ballots.

In Louisiana, if you are over the age of 60 and you request a mail in ballot, you automatically get one for every election from that day forward.  A single nursing home could receive a couple of hundred paper ballots.  What could possibly go wrong with that?

California sends a paper mail-in ballot to every registered voter in the state before every election.  In the November election it took more than a month for them to call the last of their elections.  Do we really want to be like California?

If we want to improve election security in Louisiana, we need less paper ballots, not more.  And the people that want paper ballots so bad should be the ones that have to count them after each election.  I suspect that after an election or two, they will change their tune.