We're a little more than a week away--nine days, to be precise--from the deadline for the Orleans Parish Registrar of Voters to complete the process to certify signatures on the Mayor LaToya Cantrell recall petition.
Now, thanks to data provided by the NoLaToya Campaign to the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate, we know more about who signed the petition and where they live. According to one local political analyst, questions surrounding that data and the process by which the Orleans Parish Registrar of Voters Office is using to certify the recall may help Mayor Cantrell if she challenges the results of the recall effort.
"What we've learned is that there is a sharp division based on race and neighborhood," UNO political scientist Ed Chervenak told WWL's Tommy Tucker. "Seventy-six percent of those who signed the petitions are white, but whites only make up about 37 percent of our district voters. So they are well over-represented. Most of the signatures were concentrated in the Lakeview area."
Chervenak notes that those results are based on partial data, as the NoLaToya Campaign initially delivered only 10-thousand pages of signatures to the newspaper despite a court order requiring the campaign to hand over copies of all of the signatures.
Chervenak says the secrecy of the NoLaToya Campaign's leaders may ultimately help Mayor Cantrell's cause.
"I would agree that particularly the lack of transparency is giving the mayor ammunition and would result in the mayor challenging the results," Chervenak says.
Chervenak added that the Orleans Parish Registrar of Voters Office may also provide an assist to the mayor because, according to him, the registrar has remained tight-lipped about the certification process.
"We really don't know anything because the local parish registrar has refused to tell the public what process her office is using to validate and invalidate the signatures," Chervenak said. "There's no neutral observers in there watching this and finding out what's going on."
Chervenak said it's difficult to predict what will happen once the certification deadline passes, but he suspects the result of the recall petition drive will be decided in a courtroom.
"This is unchartered territory, so it's hard to predict what's going to happen. My suspicion is that they'll release the results, the mayor will challenge them, and that this will just end up being dragged out in court, and the mayor will do everything she can to run out the clock."
