Bewilderment in elections is a bad thing. Unfortunately, that’s what the U.S. Supreme Court and Gov. Jeff Landry have created.
Whatever one thinks of the substance of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the h v. Callais redistricting case (my reaction is mixed, and complicated), we all should be disturbed by its timing and by Landry’s decision to delay the U.S. House elections while continuing to hold the Senate election and some others on May 16.
In the short run, the high court dealt h a bad hand, and Landry made it worse.
The original “bad hand” here was not necessarily the court’s decision itself (which is debatable), but when it was issued. The Supreme Court first heard this case argued last March, followed by more oral arguments in October. There was no good reason it should have taken until late April, after months of a primary campaign and after absentee voting had already begun, to issue its ruling.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh in (in an Alabama case) explained at great length how unfair and burdensome it is to change election rules close to an election. A few snippets of his verbiage will suffice. Kavanaugh agreed then with the state of Alabama that such last-minute changes are “a prescription for chaos for candidates, campaign organizations, independent groups, political parties, and voters, among others …. Running elections statewide is extraordinarily complicated and difficult. Those elections require enormous advance preparations by state and local officials, and pose significant logistical challenges …. A bedrock tenet of election law [is that] when an election is close at hand, the rules of the road must be clear and settled.”
Recognizing these undisputable realities, the court should have made sure to issue its decision months ago. It is not Landry’s fault that the court acted slothfully.
When burdened with the late court decision, Landry knew he would face legal challenges, all of them well within reason, no matter what he did.
If Landry delayed the elections on the grounds that the congressional districts are unconstitutional, one side would sue to say that those who already voted absentee had been disenfranchised and that the candidates and donors had legally recognizable stakes in going ahead with the current districts this year. If he did not delay the election on grounds similar to what Kavanaugh described in 2022, the other side would sue to say he had proceeded with unconstitutional districts.
Nonetheless, Landry should have chosen one option or the other. What Landry did, though, was significantly to increase what has been described as “” — and perhaps increased the likelihood of adverse legal ramifications, too.
By continuing with the Senate election (and in a closed primary) and a few local races, while canceling the House races (in anticipation of rescheduling them, probably in an open primary), Landry baked a smorgasbord of conundrums. The House races remain on the ballot, but supposedly votes cast in those races this time won’t count. Yet what happens if a legal challenger successfully secures a court injunction ordering the House elections to go ahead after all? Will those votes count? And will the early voters who abstained from voting for House candidates get a chance to go back and recast those votes? How would that work?
Meanwhile, the unfairness to the Senate candidates and their supporters and donors is palpable. With so much confusion, how many voters who hear that the House races are stopped will stay away from the polls entirely? There’s no way to tell which Senate candidates this would help or hurt, but it is a near-certainty that voter turnout patterns will be substantially affected.
Consider, too, that this obvious recipe for befuddlement comes on top of a situation some voters already found perplexing: namely, the return to closed party primaries after most of the past 50 years of h elections had been conducted with open primaries, meaning all candidates on one ballot regardless of party affiliation.
What Landry did by bifurcating the election may (but probably won’t) be adjudged illegal. Whether legal or not, though, it is astonishingly unjust.
To quote Kavanaugh again, belated “tinkering with election laws can lead to disruption and to unanticipated and unfair consequences.” It’s a shame the court didn’t heed those words.
Nonetheless, Landry’s decision to split the election baby isn’t Solomonic; it’s just dead wrong.