New NAACP head was Sen. Landrieu foe
15th December 2014 · 0 Comments
By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Writer
The election of former Judge Morris Reed to succeed Danatus King as head of the Local NAACP puts a curious bookend to Mary Landrieu’s tenure in the US Senate.
Reed had done more than any other local African-American leader to make sure Landrieu was not seated in Congress back in 1997, He argued for a rerun of that previous November’s election, stating in testimony before the US Senate Judiciary Committee that there were fundamental problems in the November 1996 runoffs. Irregularities, he maintained, that likely unfairly denied Reed election to the New Orleans District Attorney’s office and Landrieu’s GOP opponent Woody Jenkins to the US Senate.
Reed’s testimony that phantom multiple voters helped sway the results of that Tuesday election propelled the six-month election challenge that came close to denying Landrieu seating in the Upper House. He highlighted the Jenkins’ campaign’s acquired transcripts of more than a dozen individuals, mainly drawn from residents of the Desire and Iberville Housing Projects, who confessed to voting ten times each.
At the time, Reed echoed Jenkins’ assertion that ‘Motor Voter’ registration procedures had diabolically created phantom registered voters on the books, allowing local political staffers to rotate these dozen or more voters from polling station to polling station. According to the tale, at each polling place, the voters could cast a ballot under a name that previously had been legitimately registered—by sending in the post-card registration cards without requiring additional identification.
In other words, Reed alleged along with Woody Jenkins that the motor voter law had created multiple phantom voters, since one could register to vote by mail, and at the time, were not required by precinct workers to present IDs to vote.
Both men argued that since the practice benefited the candidates on the LIFE (Louisiana Independent Federation of Electors) ballot, the official political organization of then-Mayor Marc Morial. According their Senate testimony, they alleged that the dozen phantom voters the Jenkins’ campaign interviewed were able to cast ten ballots each dispersed at ten different polling locations, thus creating some 120 additional votes overall.
The problem was that Jenkins had lost by 5,788 votes statewide, and Reed by slightly larger margins in the City of New Orleans. While the Republican US Senate candidate’s margin was less than one vote per precinct, US Senate investigator C. Boyden Gray concluded that the number of testimonials provided would never have changed the outcome of the election. Even if multiple voting occurred, the actions of just a dozen people would have made no difference to the outcome, said Gray. Jenkins needed to prove that 5,788 votes were created, not 120.
This reporter, who personally interviewed the alleged dozen ‘multiple voters’, and who was present for the recorded questioning by Jenkins campaign staffers, noted that most came forward to testify because of a belief that there were denied the proper fee for their multiple voting activities.
As one lady put it, at the time, she was promised $25 per vote, and only got $25 for the day. Or as another said, “I voted for Mary Landrieu ten times, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt,” pointing to her Landrieu campaign chemise.
However, putting aside the credibility of the individuals in question, and the obvious reality that they did not realize that compensation for voting was illegal (part of the reason the witnesses scattered when their testimony was made public), investigations by the Jenkins campaign revealed that the money underwriting the hiring of the buses that allegedly carried these alleged multiple voters came from Video Poker Interests.
The election that put Mary Landrieu in the U.S. Senate was also the election that authorized local option video poker across many parishes of the state, including Orleans — not to mention the land-based casino and riverboat gaming.
There had been a real possibility that Orleans Parish voters might declare video poker illegal in the parish, and gaming interests opened their pocketbooks to help finance LIFE’s GOTV operations. Inadvertently, the ‘Get Out the Vote’ financing benefited the other LIFE candidates, including then-Orleans D.A. Harry Connick — the Caucasian incumbent Reed sought to defeat — and Mary Landrieu.
The irony quickly became apparent. Mitch Landrieu, the current mayor but then a state representative, had been a major opponent of video poker. He tried to convince his fellow legislators to ban the machines statewide by legislative statute. The effort was stopped by Gov. Mike Foster, who favored parish-by-parish, local option referenda.
So, if Jenkins and Reed were correct, and the dozen multiple voters were merely the tip of the political iceberg of thousands of phantom voters, one must also conclude these electors also were underwritten to vote for Mary Landrieu by the interests most opposed to her family’s political stands.
Of course, Woody Jenkins was the most anti-gambling politician in the state. He opposed all forms of legalized gaming, not just video poker as Mitch Landrieu did. Few journalists, though, challenged Jenkins’ narrative that gambling interests had helped elect Mary Landrieu. Yet, despite the spin of Reed’s and Jenkins’ testimony before the Senate, even if there were enough votes to have swayed the November 1996 election for either man, the reality became apparent that gambling money had inadvertently, not deliberately, helped Mary Landrieu (and to a lesser extent Harry Connick) emerge victorious.
The same LIFE ballots that asked voters to support the three local option gaming initiatives also had them support the entire Democratic ticket, which included Connick and Landrieu.
In other words, the LIFE ballots that helped propel Landrieu to victory were funded by video poker monies that her brother had ardently opposed. If she won according to Jenkins’ and Reed’s logic, Mary Landrieu emerged victorious because her brother’s enemies, without actually intending to, made the difference in her election.
This article originally published in the December 15, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
