Organizers of the effort to recall New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell and the Louisiana Secretary of State have agreed to agreed there were 25,000 people listed on the active voter roles who should not have been.
The settlement in the lawsuit was announced today in a virtual meeting of New Orleans Civil District Court.
Recall attorney Laura Cannizzaro Rodrigue said that the plaintiffs and the secretary of state were both satisfied removing 25,000 dead or relocated voters from active status as part of a settlement agreement.
It comes after recall organizers claimed more than 32,000 people died or moved out of Orleans Parish, but remained on the list of active voters.
This means that the recall will now require 5,000 fewer signatures on the petitions to force an election to let voters decide if they want to remove Mayor LaToya Cantrell from office.
At last report, the recall organizers had gathered about 48,000 signatures, and they were still gathering and receiving signatures.
With the settlement, the needed number of signatures would now be approximately 44,000.
The New Orleans Registrar of Voters office is evaluating the petitions to determine if the required number of registered voter signatures are confirmed.
Doug Sunseri, host of WWL's All Things Legal, says the deal was necessary because of incompetence the Orleans Parish Registrar of Voters Office.
"The Secretary of State took the bull by the horns and said we're going to fix this situation because the Orleans Parish Registrar of Voters obviously didn't do its job and was inept in updating the rolls," Sunseri said. "The Secretary of State and the NoLaToya Campaign looked at the data and said: let's come up with a number of how many people need to be removed from the rolls so they can have an accurate count as to how many votes the Recall LaToya campaign needs to get."
Sunseri noted that the Orleans Parish Registrar of Voters Office was removed as a party to the case. He said that development was telling.
"The Orleans Parish Registrar of Voters was dismissed from the case because, I think, they were determined to be irrelevant," Sunseri said. "Both sides--the Secretary of State and the NoLaToya Campaign--recognized that Sandra Wilson didn't do her job. So the Secretary of State had to usurp her power and step in and say we have to cut a deal.
"The process in order to update the voter rolls is a year-round type of process," Sunseri added. "I think the Secretary of State, the court, and the NoLaToya Recall Campaign realized that the registrar couldn't update the list throughout the year. How is she going to do it within 20 days or 10 days or five days?"
