Disability advocate files federal lawsuit over Louisiana’s new absentee ballot laws

A Louisiana absentee ballot request form. (Photo credit: Wes Muller/Louisiana Illuminator)

A group that advocates for people with disabilities filed a Voting Rights Act lawsuit Wednesday against the state of Louisiana to block a slate of new laws that target absentee voting.

The four laws in question include one that makes it illegal to print out an application form from a state website and give it to someone who didn’t ask for it. It is also now illegal to help fill out, mail or witness an absentee ballot for more than one person who isn’t an immediate family member.

The organization, Disability Rights Louisiana, filed the suit in federal court in the Middle District of Louisiana, requesting the judge to issue a statewide injunction to stop Secretary of State Nancy Landry from implementing and enforcing the new laws the Louisiana Legislature passed this year that target the rising popularity of absentee voting.

“While folks were rightfully up in arms about the laws mandating the Ten Commandments in classrooms, laws that suppress the votes of the disabled were passed with much less fanfare,” Andrew Bizer, the attorney for Disability Rights Louisiana, said in a statement. “The Voting Rights Act gives people with disabilities the right to assistance in voting by anyone they trust. These new laws make that nearly impossible for people living in nursing or group homes. These laws are undemocratic and must be stopped.”

The laws at issue are:

• Act No. 380 , formerly House Bill 476 sponsored by Rep. Josh Carlson, R-Lafayette. This measure, scheduled to take effect Aug. 1, prohibits a person from mailing more than one absentee ballot for a voter who isn’t an immediate family member. Prior to this law, it was already illegal for non-relatives to hand deliver more than one absentee ballot per election to a registrar of voters to be counted. Carlson’s legislation expanded that statute to prohibit delivery by mail.
• Act No. 317 , formerly Senate Bill 218 by Sen. Caleb Kleinpeter, R-Port Allen. Also scheduled to take effect Aug. 1, it prohibits a person from giving an absentee ballot application to more than one person who is not an immediate family member. The prohibition isn’t for the actual absentee ballot but for the form used to request an absentee ballot. It further makes it illegal to give one of those forms, which are publicly available to print from the Secretary of State’s website, to anyone who didn’t formally request one. Lastly, the act contains a broad catch-all provision that makes it illegal to “facilitate the distribution and collection of absentee by mail ballot applications or absentee by mail ballots in violation of this Title.”
• Act No. 302 by Kleinpeter and Act No. 712 by Rep. Polly Thomas, R-Metairie. Similar in effect, both measures make it a crime for anyone to be the witness on an absentee ballot for more than one person who isn’t an immediate family member.

“The statutes at issue facially violate the Voting Rights Act and threaten to make criminals of the caretakers, nurses, doctors, or others who assist individuals with disabilities and the elderly,” the lawsuit from Disability Rights Louisiana reads.

Absentee voting numbers mixed

Absentee mail voting typically starts about two weeks before an election. It has steadily grown in popularity over the past 20 years, especially during the coronavirus pandemic when it became an important avenue for voter participation in the 2020 presidential election.

It also became a controversial one when former President Donald Trump and his supporters began to spread lies about his loss to President Joe Biden. Many centered around absentee voting, which Democratic voters typically use more than Republicans.

That trend did not hold for Louisiana’s 2023 gubernatorial election. Democrats dominated early voting in 2020 in Louisiana, but Republicans cast the lion’s share of early votes last October with 44% of the tally compared with Democrats’ 41%.

Secretary of state wants absentee ballot restrictions, despite lack of voter fraud

It may be too soon to tell if those results signal a long-term shift or just an anomaly from what was an unusually sleepy primary election that saw one of the lowest voter turnouts of any Louisiana governor’s race in recent history.

For thousands of voters, absentee ballots are their only chance to participate. An estimated 1 out of 3 adults in Louisiana, over 1.1 million people, have a disability, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Disabled people disproportionately rely on absentee voting due to difficulties with mobility, limited access to transportation, risks associated with in-person voting, accessibility barriers at polling places or being confined. Some of those disabled voters also rely on other people to assist them in applying for an absentee ballot, filling it out and sending it through the mail.

Nearly 15,000 disabled voters submitted absentee ballots with the assistance of others during the 2020 presidential election, and more than 6,000 did so during last October’s election, according to the Secretary of State’s Office. Those are relatively small portions of the electorate, but the figures don’t include disabled voters who voted absentee without assistance.

In total, more than 95,000 voters cast absentee ballots in the governor’s race last year, comprising 26% of the early vote. That was an increase of nine percentage points over the share of absentee ballots during 2020 early voting.

Election officials cite local fraud incidents

All four of the new laws were part of what Landry called her “election integrity legislative package,” although she and her predecessor, Kyle Ardoin, repeatedly affirmed Louisiana has not seen any instances of widespread voter fraud, but Landry has pointed to some minor incidents of election crimes to make her case.

In previous statements to the Illuminator , Landry’s office cited three incidents of misdemeanor election crimes in Louisiana that impacted small numbers of votes. None of the incidents revealed evidence of widespread wrongdoing among absentee voters.

One was a vote-buying scheme concocted by a handful of local officials in Tangipahoa Parish between 2016 and 2020. Another occurred in a 2018 local election in Acadia Parish when a woman, Delores “Dee” Handy of Crowley, assisting two elderly voters allegedly failed to mark their absentee ballots as directed. She was convicted and served a term of probation. The third incident occurred in 2020, when an Amite City councilman allegedly wrote false addresses on two voter registration forms.

Disability Rights Louisiana argues that Landry’s new laws will do little, if anything, to prevent fraud and only serve to curtail the voting rights of many disabled people. Under the state’s new laws, a disabled person living in a nursing home or group home may not receive help from a staff member of that facility to mail an absentee ballot or print an absentee request form if that staff member has already helped or plans to help any other resident or patient with the same tasks.

The lawsuit argues that Louisiana’s new laws directly contradict the federal Voting Rights Act, which Congress amended in 1984 to ensure that people who require assistance in voting due to disability can receive assistance “from a person of the voter’s choice.”

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The post Disability advocate files federal lawsuit over Louisiana’s new absentee ballot laws appeared first on Louisiana Illuminator .