Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin testified before the House and Governmental Affairs Committee the other day and said, “I'm dead-dog tired of my staff, and the clerks, registrars and their staff getting poked at!” He joined Newell on the air Thursday morning to explain what he meant.
“I've been watching this with much curiosity,” Newell said. “Obviously we know that there's a national dialogue going on, predominantly within the Republican Party, about election integrity and election security. It seems to have carried to the Louisiana state house as well, but I haven't heard of anyone that is bringing up evidence of any problems here. Your thoughts?”
“I'm real proud of the people that are on my staff, the registrar’s staff, all the clerks,” Ardoin said. “'m proud of the hard work that we all do to perform elections. We've not had major problems in Louisiana. We certainly weren't one of the states that have had problems after the 2020 presidential election, and I'm just trying to reinforce that idea. Obviously election integrity is a priority, and has always been a priority of my administration. I don't want folks to feel that there's a problem out there. I just felt like it was time to speak up. No offense to anyone, I just wanted folks to realize that there weren't problems in Louisiana like there were in other states, and that we continue to look for ways to improve election integrity. I've got legislation that's moving through the process to do just that.”
“I agree with you,” Newell said. “I think that when you make these repeated efforts, especially through the legislative process, introducing these resolutions as if something is actually wrong without ever talking about what's wrong, or maybe in the hopes of finding something wrong... it's just not the right messaging, right? We've been able to report election results in a relatively short time period following the closing of the polls. I was reading an article just yesterday about Philadelphia. They had 40,000 mail-in votes. They anticipated taking three days to count these votes. This is not something that we've experienced here in Louisiana, and we continue really to set the gold standard on many different fronts in the manner in which we handle elections.”
“Exactly right. The Electoral Integrity Project ranks Louisiana 12th in the nation in election integrity,” Ardoin continued. “When you categorize it and break down what my office is actually in charge of, then we rank even higher than that. We ranked first in the entire South. Louisiana is definitely a leader in our elections processes and procedures. We focus in on making sure all of our unofficial results are in on election night, and we continue to do so, because we don't want folks to feel like the fix is on. The quicker you can report - as long as you're accurate, accuracy is important - we certainly don't want to be lingering days after the election counting votes, because I think that's when people become very suspicious.”
“What's motivating this?” Newell asked.
“I think folks are just upset about the outcome, and what they saw in Pennsylvania, what they felt like they saw in Georgia and Arizona and Michigan, perhaps even Wisconsin,” came the answer. “And unfortunately they're applying that to Louisiana, and that's just not the case. Louisiana is dramatically different from all of those states. We're a top-down state, which means every parish is performing the same procedures, the same functions at the same time, in the same manner. We're all on the same page. Whereas in other states, it's a county by county process. What they saw in other States doesn't apply here in Louisiana.”
Hear the entire interview in the audio player below.
