As election season winds down, maybe this will be the last conducted under an odious Louisiana law that chills free speech and degrades election decision-making.

Federal constitutional law sets only the most obvious and basic parameters regarding campaign communications. Basically, only the standards governing defamation apply: i.e., a public figure such as a contestant for office can have any expression made against him except those that are patently untrue and done with malice. And there’s no constitutional prohibition against making whatever claims about a candidate’s self, regardless of their veracity.

Just so. Except in those intentional defamatory cases, the political process should be allowed to play out to separate the wheat from the chaff, especially when this deals with claims made by a candidate about himself. If outright lies about past behavior or statements are made, electioneering by opposing forces quite often uncovers the falsity.

However, Louisiana law goes much further. R.S. 18:1463 mainly is designed to prohibit campaigns or their allies from falsely associating opponents with groups. But it also contains the controversial content that  “an election cannot be held in a fair and ethical manner when any candidate or other person is allowed … to publish statements that make scurrilous, false, or irresponsible adverse comments about a candidate or a proposition.” It has been interpreted to include candidates making statements about themselves, and essentially makes a judge’s opinion, who can issue an order enjoining distribution of that material, crucial to determine what is fact and fiction.

An example of where this went horribly wrong occurred in the Republican primary election contest leading up to the upcoming Senate election. A special interest group sympathetic to eventual nominee Rep. Julia Letlow took to court opponent state Treas. John Fleming to enjoin his advertisement that said he “never voted for Carbon Sequestration.” Fleming pulled the ad rather than face a trial that would have cost money and potentially adverse publicity.

This despite the fact that by no means was his statement in any clear way false. The group laid out “evidence” allegedly from a series of bills or amendments Fleming voted for in his years in the House of Representatives from 2009-17. Most dealt with appropriations bills supporting funds for efforts related to administering a regime of tax breaks and research including those for carbon capture, while a couple more directly addressed ancillary efforts related to carrying out such efforts.

Yet none actually were votes ratifying the concept specifically of “Carbon Sequestration.” Indeed, the vote setting up the tax credit to complement such efforts occurred the year before Fleming reached office, and the next time that faced scrutiny was a couple of years after he left. The very most critical impugning one could levy concerning the evidence for the statement’s veracity was that it was ambiguous.

In such amorphous cases, it’s entirely appropriate that a political process work to let voters decide what interpretation seems more credible. There’s no good reason for an individual judge to substitute his own opinion and then have the force of law back it. This only can suppress robust debate about candidates and lead to self-censorship of information potentially relevant to voters, out of fear that anything without absolute unambiguity could bring a penalty harmful to the candidate disseminating the information.

That impoverishes the electoral process. As soon as possible at the very least the Legislature should emend away the portion of statute that allows legal action against electoral opponents who are alleged to say untrue things about themselves. It may not be a bad idea to junk the entire thing, for we can trust federal defamation statutes to circumscribe outright lying about an opponent and the electioneering process can take care of the remaining borderline cases and self-aggrandizing or misdirection in statements made about oneself.