Voters trickle into a downtown Baton Rouge precinct Saturday, Oct. 13, 2023, for the statewide primary election. (Jonathan Peterson for Louisiana Illuminator)
Under renewed pressure from right-wing election deniers, the Louisiana Legislature abandoned its attempt to repeal a 2021 law that has made the task of buying voting machines overly burdensome.
House Bill 856, sponsored by Rep. Mike Johnson, R-Pineville, died just one step shy of final passage during the closing days of the 2024 legislative session after Johnson ended conference committee negotiations.
The proposal would have repealed parts of a 2021 law that added multiple layers of bureaucracy to the Louisiana Department of State’s process to purchase new voting systems. The most significant parts of the bill were created through a late-stage amendment adopted on the Senate floor last week.
In an interview Sunday, Johnson said he decided to sideline the bill after some constituents and other lawmakers expressed concerns with the “process” used to amend the bill into its final version.
Typically, most scrutiny and vetting of legislation occurs during committee hearings before a bill reaches the floor of a chamber, so late-stage floor amendments that make big changes to a bill can sometimes generate pushback from other lawmakers or constituents.
Johnson’s legislation began as a simple one-page bill to add a short clause to an existing statute, making the secretary of state responsible for all “voting system maintenance and repair.” That version of the bill sailed through both chambers without opposition. It wasn’t until a May 8 Senate & Governmental Affairs Committee hearing when lawmakers first hinted at the possibility of an amendment.
At the hearing, lawmakers asked Secretary of State Nancy Landry for an update on the purchase of new voting machines. Landry, a Republican, said it was her “number one priority” but that the 2021 law had turned the acquisition into a “long and drawn out process.”
In a later interview, Landry’s spokesperson, Joel Watson, said the process involves multiple layers of bureaucratic red tape that will delay the purchase of new voting machines an additional two years.
The 2021 law created the Voting System Commission within the Louisiana Department of State. Composed of government officials who serve without compensation, the commission is charged with analyzing any available voting systems and recommending a specific type to the secretary of state. It also created a separate Voting System Proposal Evaluation Committee to independently review vendors that submitted bids before making a final recommendation.
Senate & Governmental Affairs Committee members only briefly discussed the bureaucratic issues at the May 8 hearing and advanced the original version of Johnson’s bill without amendments. It wasn’t until May 29 when the bill came up for a Senate floor vote that the public and most lawmakers saw the extent of the changes Landry was requesting through an amendment from Sen. Mike Reese, R-Leesville. Still, the new amended version of the bill cleared the chamber with unanimous support.
The amended version proposed to keep both the Voting System Commission and the Voting System Proposal Evaluation Committee with some small changes. It would have repealed requirements that the secretary of state create rules for the purchase of voting machines and hire at least three independent experts to certify them.
“We didn’t want to take away these parts of the bill geared toward transparency,” Watson said in an interview at the time. “We just didn’t want to have to go through a massive two-year-extra process … The system we have now is far too old to go through a process that would add two additional years.”
The state’s current voting machines are almost 35 years old and have become difficult and costly to repair because parts are no longer made for them. If Johnson’s bill had passed and become law, the state could have acquired new voting machines in about three years as opposed to five, Watson said.
Lawmakers created the Voting System Commission and all the other sweeping requirements under pressure from a small group of Donald Trump supporters who came to the State Capitol several times during the 2021 legislative session and bogged down public hearings with far-fetched conspiracy theories on the 2020 presidential election.
Louisiana struggles to buy new voting machines after placating election deniers
They alleged the election was fraudulently stolen from Trump without actual evidence to support their claims, but that didn’t stop some Republicans on the panel from embracing the lies.
Many of the baseless arguments were about Dominion Voting Systems, a voting machine vendor that many Trump supporters falsely accused of rigging the election.
In 2023, Dominion won a nearly $800 million defamation lawsuit settlement against Fox News, which spread some of the conspiracy theories. Court filings, as detailed in The New York Times and other sources, exposed scores of internal emails and text messages showing Fox’s biggest TV personalities and executives collaborating with top GOP operatives and knowingly repeating lies on the air.
By that time, much of the damage caused by Trump’s “Big Lie” had already taken its toll. In 2021, Louisiana Republicans had forced then-Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin, also a Republican, to cancel open bidding for new voting machines because they said the bid language was too favorable to Dominion.
Other false allegations came from a right-wing activist’s film, “2,000 Mules,” that has been widely debunked by law enforcement agencies, independent experts and media investigations. Even the conservative media group that published it later halted all distribution of the film, pulled it from their platforms and issued an apology on their website.
The film falsely alleged Democrat-aligned “ballot mules” were supposedly paid to illegally collect and drop off ballots in swing states during the 2020 presidential election. But the ballot harvesting allegations were based on faulty assumptions, anonymous accounts and improper analysis of cellphone location data, which is not precise enough to confirm someone deposited a ballot into a drop box, according to experts quoted in an Associated Press report.
Landry, herself, backed legislation this session to stop ballot harvesting even though she and her predecessor, Ardoin, have affirmed Louisiana has not seen any instances of widespread voter fraud.
When word got out about big changes to Johnson’s bill, some election deniers sprung into action and began to accuse Reese, Johnson and Landry of being a part of the conspiracy and surreptitiously trying to repeal the 2021 law.
Chris Alexander with the right-wing Louisiana Citizen Advocacy Group accused Landry of using Johnson’s bill in an attempt to accumulate “enormous unchecked power” and dismantle government checks and balances.
“This thing is a train wreck, and we have every reason to believe that this was done by design — not by accident,” Alexander said on a podcast last week. “… I can’t help but think that this is so that the election can go the way that some people want it to go.”
Landry’s office has pushed back on Alexander’s allegations and pointed out that the amendments left the main elements of the 2021 law intact.
Had the bill become law, the process of buying voting machines would still be subject to oversight from the House and Governmental Affairs Committee, the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee and the Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget. The vetting and solicitation process would have still included the public input through the Voting System Commission and the Voting System Proposal Evaluation Committee. Also, the bill would have retained requirements that vendors disclose their investors, including any foreign sources of financial support, Watson said.
“It is unfortunate that some groups were dishonest in their opposition to much-needed reforms to current law,” Watson wrote in a text message Tuesday.
Although he sidelined the bill, Johnson said he still supports the changes it proposed and intends to work on the issue again next year.
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