Early voting for the May 16 election began Saturday with confusion over whether all the races listed on the ballot are still taking place.
Even motivated voters who showed up within the first few hours said they weren’t quite sure whether the U.S. House elections were still happening.
“I went ahead and voted for who I wanted to vote for. If they don’t count it, that’s their problem,” said Betty Powers, who has participated in every election since 1968, outside an East Baton Rouge Parish polling location.
Republican Gov. Jeff Landry canceled the U.S. House races Thursday, a day after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Louisiana’s House district map unconstitutional.
Republican Secretary of State Nancy Landry, who is not related to the governor, has said votes cast in Louisiana’s U.S. House races won’t be counted. But that didn’t deter several early voters from picking a House candidate on their ballot anyway.
“Something is delayed … but I don’t know if it affects East Baton Rouge Parish or not,” said Valerie Amato, who wore a shirt with the picture of President Donald Trump and the slogan ‘I’m still here’ to her polling location. She said she voted for a U.S. House candidate out of habit.
Mail-in ballots with U.S. House races listed had already been sent out by the time the governor declared the election was off. Nancy Landry’s office also didn’t have enough notice to remove the affected candidates’ names from the ballots before in-person voting started.
“[The House race] was still on there, so we voted for it,” said Evan Delahaye, a Baton Rouge resident who voted early with his brother.
“I am worried we’re going to have to vote twice,” he added.
Gov. Landry’s move to postpone an election for a reason other than a natural disaster or health crisis is highly unusual, if not unprecedented, in Louisiana.
The state has proceeded with U.S. House races after federal courts declared the voting districts unconstitutional in the past, most recently in 2022. Previously, officials agreed it was too close to the elections to change the map, and that new districts could wait until the following cycle two years later.
But Landry and other Republican officials insist the Supreme Court decision from Wednesday is so sweeping in nature that it demands the aggressive action of calling off an election, even when absentee voting was already underway.
Trump is also putting pressure on GOP elected officials across the country to create as many Republican-leaning districts in Congress as possible before the end of the year to ensure the party maintains its advantage in the House.
The Supreme Court declared Louisiana’s current House map unconstitutional because it said state officials relied too heavily on the race of voters to draw its district boundaries. As a result, Landry and Republican legislators are expected to create a new map that would eliminate one, or both, of the state’s majority-Black districts.
Calling off the current elections allows the governor and Republican state lawmakers to draw up new, more conservative U.S. House districts sooner.
A flurry of lawsuits have been filed in federal and state court attempting to stop the governor’s actions and keep Louisiana’s House races moving forward. So far, none have been successful, but more court decisions could be handed down in the next few days.
In light of that uncertainty, U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican whose contentious reelection campaign is on the same ballot, was among those who chose to still pick a candidate in a House race when he went to early vote this week.
Cassidy said he wasn’t convinced a court would uphold Landry’s decision to call off the election and wanted to vote just in case.
The senator said he agreed with the Supreme Court ruling on the U.S. House districts, but he was uncomfortable with the decision to cancel those races less than 48 hours before early voting began.
“The way that the election has transpired, that has almost treated the voter with disrespect,” Cassidy said in an interview with reporters. “That’s confusing to voters … We should be serving the voter, not politicians.”