Gov. Edwards vows to block Republican emergency election plan
23rd August 2020 · 0 Comments
By Fritz Esker
Contributing Writer
Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards announced last Tuesday (August 18) that he would block Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin’s emergency plan for fall elections because it didn’t include protections for those under quarantine or at greater risk for COVID-19 complications and fatalities.
“I do not support his plan. I don’t believe that it accommodates all the voters that should [be] accommodated in this public health emergency,” Edwards said at his August 18 press conference. “That plan will not be carried out for these elections.”
Ardoin’s plan sought to expand the early voting window from seven to ten days and add an extra hour-and-a-half of voting time to each day. This would still be a reduction from the thirteen early voting days in Louisiana’s summer elections.
Under Ardoin’s plan, absentee balloting would have been limited to those who qualified under Louisiana’s pre-pandemic procedures: voters 65 or older, military members, overseas voters, hospitalized voters, and people who will not be in town for the election. The only concession for the pandemic allowed anyone who tested positive for COVID-19 during and after early voting but before Election Day (Nov. 3) to get an absentee ballot under the hospitalization excuse.
The existing plan, drafted in April, expanded access to mail-in ballots for people with high-risk medical conditions, like prominent COVID-19 co-morbidities such as diabetes and hypertension. It also included people under a medically necessary quarantine or isolation order, those with COVID-19 symptoms, and those caring for someone subjected to a quarantine order.
Gov. Edwards felt reductions in absentee voting were unreasonable at a time when Louisiana was still in the midst of fighting off a summer surge in COVID-19 cases. 4,554 Louisianians have died from the disease since March.
“Today there’s more COVID in Louisiana than when we formulated the first plan,” Gov. Edwards said. “It just doesn’t make any sense to me.”
Even before the Governor’s rebuke of Ardoin’s new plan, it received harsh criticism from activists and legislators. Alannah Odoms Hebert, ACLU of Louisiana’s executive director, said the previous plan failed to meaningfully expand absentee voting. The new one would have been even worse.
“COVID-19 has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and had a disproportionate impact on communities of color. For many voters, especially the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions, voting absentee is the safest option to cast a ballot amid COVID-19,” said Hebert. “This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. Every eligible voter has a right to make their voice heard without imperiling their health or the health of their loved ones.”
In his plan, Ardoin voiced concerns that ballots requested less than seven days before an election were at “high risk” of not being delivered to the election offices in time. He also pointed to other problems with mail-in ballots in July. Ardoin referenced 5,000 absentee ballot requests in Orleans Parish that were inadvertently held due to insufficient postage, even though election mail is not supposed to be held for those reasons.
Louisiana State Representative Royce Duplessis (Democrat, District 93) voted for the emergency election plan in April even though he did not think it went far enough to provide for at-risk voters. He felt Ardoin’s postal service excuses were just a new way for Republicans to obstruct absentee voting and suppress voters.
“We should all be very concerned about what is being done to the USPS. However, as a state, we should not use that as an excuse to not ensure maximum voter participation. When we debated the most recent emergency election plan, we heard nothing but unfounded fear about voter fraud. Now the focus has shifted away from fraud to the unreliability of the USPS. But I want to know what has the Secretary of State or anyone else in Republican leadership done to ensure that the USPS was properly functioning? If a voter chooses to rely on the USPS to vote by mail, that should be their choice. It should not be the state who stands in their way, ultimately suppressing their vote,” said Duplessis in an email statement.
Mid-City voter Jenny Simoneaux said she will vote in person in the upcoming Louisiana elections if there is no other option, but said mail-in ballots should be widely available.
“It’s irresponsible to put people’s lives at risk when safe mail-in voting has been accomplished for decades by the U.S. military all over the world,” said Simoneaux.
Riverbend voter Jason Sanchez suffers from hypertension, but said he planned to vote in person. He said he has no problem with mail-in voting, but likes the in-person experience and believes in the importance of every vote.
This article originally published in the August 24, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
