A contingent of more than 50 Louisiana voters who were merely bystanders in the recent campaign to recall New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell are headed to Baton Rouge Tuesday, April 25 to voice their support of H.B. 212 by Covington State Rep. Paul Hollis. If passed, the new law will make it easier to recall any elected official.
“I introduced this legislation because I believe in real time accountability,” said Hollis. “Whether an elected official’s term is 2, 4 or 6 years, voters want and deserve an opportunity to make change when someone does something terribly wrong.” H.B. 212 will alter the method currently used to determine the number of qualified electors needed to set in motion a recall election and thereby greatly reduce how many voters must participate.
“Many members of the Home Defense Foundation are traveling to Baton Rouge from Jefferson and St. Tammany Parishes because they remember the Mike Yenni and Peter Galvan recalls as impossible. The number of signatures needed to recall an official in Louisiana is just too high,” said HDF founder and president Michael Weinberger.
Present law requires that a petition to recall an elected official shall be signed by a percentage of the total number of electors of the voting area. If fewer than 1,000 electors reside within the voting area, 40 percent of them must sign the petition. If more than 25,000 but fewer than 100,000 electors rise within the voting area, current law requires the petition be signed by 25 percent of that group. For voting areas with more than 100,000 qualified electors, the number of petitions needed drops to 20 percent.
If Hollis’ bill is approved by the full legislature and signed by Governor John Bel Edwards, the number of qualified electors needed would become a percentage of the number of qualified electors who voted in the contest electing the public official to office rather than the number of elector registered to vote. The bill further states that if the public official was elected without opposition, the percentage would be based upon the number of electors in the voting area who voted in the most recent election for an office that encompassed the voting area.
In the recent recall campaign in Orleans Parish, organizers unsuccessfully attempted to secure almost 50,000 petitions which were properly filled out, hand-signed and included the signature of a witness. On the date recall leaders Belden Batiste and Eileen Carter submitted the document that kicked off the six-month recall campaign, state law required that Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin produce a report of the number of qualified electors in the voting area. Ardoin was also legally obligated to provide that same information to the registrar of voters.
The proposed law would keep those procedures in effect but also would require that the secretary of state notify the registrar of voters of the number of electors who voted in the contest electing the public official to his or her office, or if the public official was elected without opposition, the number of electors in the voting area who voted in the most recent election for an office that encompassed the voting area.
The current law requires the governor to issue a proclamation ordering the election if the required number of electors of the voting area sign the recall petition. It further requires that the total number of registered voters in the voting area and the total number of voters in the voting area who signed the petition be calculated from the totals of the certificate of all the registrars of voters received by the governor.
Instead under the proposed law, the total calculated from the certificates will reflect the total number of registered voters in the area, the total number of area registered voters who signed the petition and the number of electors who voted in the contest electing the public official to his or her office.
Had this new law been in effect when the recall campaign began in 2022, only 15,065 verified signatures would have been needed. Cantrell won re-election on November 13, 2021 after receiving 75,325 votes.
The legislation will be heard by the House and Government Affairs Committee in House Committee Room 3. State Rep. John M. Stefanski, who is expected to qualify for Attorney General, chairs the committee. Committee members from the metro area include Vice Chair State Rep. Rodney Lyons and State Rep. Polly Thomas both from Jefferson Parish as well as New Orleans State Rep. Candace Newell. Northshore State Rep. Richard Nelson, an announced candidate for governor, is also a committee member. The meeting will begin at 9 a.m. H.B. 212 is the fourth item on the committee’s agenda.
Editor’s note: The article has been edited to correct the spelling of accountability in the title.
