Louisiana secretary of state, criticized for 'strange' deal on recall signatures, earns new opponent

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday March 16, 2023 · 2:15 PM PDT

2023/03/16 · 14:15

FILE - Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin hosts the summer conference of the National Association of Secretaries of State in Baton Rouge, La., July 8, 2022. In 2021 Ardoin shelved another voting systems replacement attempt after the process was challenged by voting machine companies that claimed favoritism for the stateâ€™s current vendor, Dominion Voting Systems. (AP Photo/Matthew Hinton, File) — Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin (R)

Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin attracted wide attention earlier this month when the Republican took part in an unusual settlement to lower the number of signatures needed to force a recall vote against New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, but now he has his own electoral future to worry about. Public Service Commissioner Mike Francis, a former state GOP chair who serves on the five-person body that regulates utilities, announced Wednesday that he’d take on Ardoin in this October’s all-party primary and said he would self-fund as much as he needs.

Francis, who also used to run an oil drilling firm, said last week, “It may take $1 million on television to get my message out, but I will.” He added, “Half of the people in this state don’t know who the secretary of state is and the other half don’t know who Mike Francis is yet, either.” The field already includes an underfunded Big Lie spreader, grocery store owner Brandon Trosclair. If no one wins a majority of the vote, a runoff would take place in November.

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Francis said he was running in order to support local election clerks, arguing that Louisiana needs “bottom-up” leadership. Ardoin himself demonstrated a very different style of leadership just two weeks ago when he reached an agreement with the campaign to recall Cantrell that lowered the number of signatures needed to make the ballot from 50,000 to 45,000, though it still remains to be seen if organizers submitted enough petitions to reach even this lower target. (The deadline to verify petitions is March 22.)

That deal, which law professor Quinn Yeargain termed “very strange” in a recent interview with NOLA.com, resulted in Ardoin’s office agreeing that 25,000 New Orleanians would not be considered active voters “for purposes of the recall petition” even though no voter’s status would actually change. The agreement was blessed by New Orleans Judge Jennifer Medley about a week before the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that she herself had signed a petition to recall Cantrell―information that only surfaced because the paper found her signature among the 10,000 pages that the recall campaign turned over amidst the ongoing court battle.

Cantrell, who is a Democrat, soon filed a pair of lawsuits to overturn that settlement, charging that Ardoin reached a “back room deal” with the recall campaign. The mayor’s legal team also blasted Medley in their court filings, writing, “The signing of a judgment, which was flawed on its face, by a jurist who had a vested interest in the outcome, calls the entire process into question.” Francis, though, doesn’t appear to have brought up the matter yet in his campaign to unseat Ardoin.

Louisiana secretary of state, criticized for 'strange' deal on recall signatures, earns new opponent

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