Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) defended his decision to suspend his state’s ongoing primary election to redraw the congressional maps, even after 45,000 ballots had already been cast, saying that discarding those votes was “not a big” deal.
In an interview airing Sunday on CBS’ 60 Minutes, reporter Cecilia Vega asked Landry what would happen to the votes already cast in the congressional primaries, which Landry suspended in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Callais v. Louisiana, calling it an “election emergency.”
“Oh, those ballots are discarded and, and those voters will vote again in November,” Landry replied.
“You say that like it’s not a big deal,” Vega then remarked.
“Well, it’s not a big de– it’s not my fault,” Landry said. “If anybody has a grievance, take it to the United States Supreme Court.”
The comments quickly made their way into a court filing, when lawyers for a Democrat running in Louisiana’s 5th congressional district challenging the suspended primaries formally notified the court Monday of Landry’s interview.
In his majority opinion in Callais, Justice Samuel Alito decimated what remained of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), a landmark civil rights law enacted in 1965, relying on faulty data to argue that institutional racism has been relegated to the history books. Landry largely agreed with Alito.
“I mean, think about it. Barack Obama was elected twice as the United States president. We’ve had a number of minorities elected. We’ve seen a rise of Republican candidates who are Black get elected,” Landry said. “I mean, are we really trying to drug [sic] up the past only to continue a failed narrative?”
The failed narrative, he added, was “that people in Louisiana are racist… that basically we won’t elect black people.”
No Black candidate has won a statewide office in Louisiana since Reconstruction. The only four Black congressmen elected in Louisiana all came from majority-black districts created pursuant to the VRA. And all four testified against drawing new maps last week.
