The NOLaToya Recall has provided hope for many, who are concerned about their future and the future of the city we all love – New Orleans. Has the registrar put that hope at risk due to outright failings? Yes.
Recall organizers, like Eileen Carter, learned that they had a steep mountain to climb, if not an impossible one. How do you succeed, when your goal is based on a proposition that requires a percentage of active registered voters…but those active voter rolls are inaccurate? So, you plod on. You do your due diligence and examine the active voter registration rolls only to discover that there are people on those rolls who moved out of the parish or are dead…some for a decade or longer. (And, we’re talking tens of thousands.) Now you have a moving target of signatures required to trigger a recall election. NOT good.
But like Eileen Carter, Co-Chair of the NOLAToya.com recall, said recently on my show …”that’s not fair.” I agree. The efforts the recall campaign is making and the goals they’ve set are based on the presumption that the individual charged with the maintenance of that voter registration list, has actually been doing their job. So, you petition to find out the number of signatures you need to trigger a recall election, only to find that that number is in fact inflated… through no fault of your own. Should the organizers who’ve taken on this recall mission or the registered voters who signed the petition be the ones who suffer?
The whole system is set up as another check on accountability in case the electorate desires to remove an elected official who is not doing what they’re charged to do, separate and apart from an election that’s held once every four years. So for me, when it comes to balance and fairness, any decisions about who should be favored if there’s a discrepancy or failure, should always fall on the side of the electorate. I based this on the fact that there’s a presumption that an appointed-for-life official is actually doing their job. Should the burden be on the citizen, who signed the petition, to reach and achieve a number that’s inflated?
That’s would be a totally unfair proposition.
But if those in charge fail to remedy that recall number in court, who bears the cost? Somebody has the obligation to remedy those voter rolls. I believe the number that was achieved…reducing the recall threshold by 25,000…was done so by looking back at the last canvas that identified voters who needed to be purged, but the registrar had not done so. There does seem to have been some methodology for achieving that baseline.
You’ll recall that the proponents of the NOLaToya Recall said they believed there could be over 40,000 inactive voters (deceased or moved out of the parish). If that is in fact the case, in my mind…that’s criminal. That’s sheer negligence. I’ve even heard the number could be as high as 72,000 inappropriate voters on the rolls.
These are scary observations about the upkeep of the sanctity of the voter registration rolls. This needs to be fixed, and it needs to be fixed now.
One thing I would love to see this legislative session, is for our state leaders to pass a measure that mandates a complete state audit of every parish and their voter registration rolls. We need to compel these lifetime-appointed individuals to prove that their voter rolls are in good shape. That is definitely an exercise worth our attention. If we have to go through another scandalous revelation of a registrar who is not doing their job, we will begin to lose confidence in the whole electoral process.
Then we’re all sunk.
