Sometime Monday night, Oct. 5, a routine maintenance job on Louisiana's statewide voter database went wrong. When it finished, roughly 67,000 registered voters who had done nothing to earn it were sitting on the state's inactive list.
The Secretary of State's office owned the mistake quickly. Trey Williams, the deputy secretary for communications, blamed "human error" during the maintenance process and said the job had misclassified about 67,000 voters statewide. "Our staff immediately identified the issue and began correcting it," Williams said in an email to the Louisiana Illuminator. "We also implemented additional safeguards to prevent this from happening again."
By Wednesday, Oct. 7, the office was telling reporters the cleanup was done. In a statement to the election news site Declare, Williams added a line the earlier reports did not carry: "All affected records have been corrected." The Illuminator's first report, published early Wednesday, Oct. 7, said the office expected to restore the correct status by that day, and later rewrites on KSLA and WBRZ on Thursday, Oct. 8, still described the restoration in the future tense. As of Monday, Oct. 12, the office had not posted a public notice of its own that LPR could find, so the best evidence that the fix is finished is the office's word. That is probably good enough. It is also a reason to spend thirty seconds checking.
The office deserves credit for the response. Election offices run maintenance jobs on enormous files, and sometimes one breaks. The test is whether the people in charge own the error out loud and repair it before anyone's ballot is affected. By its own account, Louisiana's office passed that test within about two days. Declare, which covers election administration, set the Louisiana mistake beside a far larger one in Texas, where the Dallas Morning News has put the backlog of unsent online registration records at no fewer than 590,000. Sixty-seven thousand wrong flags that were reversed in two days is a small problem next to that.
Small does not mean nothing, though. Courtney Price of East Baton Rouge Parish told the Illuminator she found her status switched to inactive when she looked it up that Monday evening. She has lived at the same address for more than a decade and calls herself a consistent voter. When she emailed Steve Raborn, the parish registrar, he told her the problem had come from the Secretary of State. Price caught it because she happened to look.
Inactive status means less than it sounds like. Inactive voters remain eligible to vote under Louisiana law, and Williams said the glitch would not affect anyone's eligibility or ability to vote. The state's inactive list includes voters whose addresses a parish registrar could not verify during the annual review of the rolls. A voter whose address is out of date can still cast a ballot but has to confirm where they live when voting, using a photo ID and proof of current address. Someone with no voter ID on Election Day fills out an affidavit form. The real risk is long-term: an inactive voter who never confirms an address and skips two consecutive federal election cycles can be dropped from the rolls altogether. Nobody wants a database hiccup to be the first step on that road, and nobody wants a line of confused voters arguing with poll commissioners on Nov. 3.
The calendar matters here. Louisiana's deadline to register in person, by mail or at an OMV office for the Nov. 3 election was Oct. 5, the same Monday the database job went sideways. The deadline to register or update a registration through the GeauxVote online system is today, Tuesday, Oct. 13. Online updates work for voters who have already put their new address on their Louisiana driver's license or state ID. Others can still contact their parish registrar of voters.
Checking takes less time than reading this article. Go to the Secretary of State's Voter Portal at voterportal.sos.la.gov, choose "Search By Voter" and enter your information, or use the GeauxVote mobile app. If your record shows anything wrong, call your parish registrar or the state elections hotline at 1-800-883-2805 by today, Tuesday, Oct. 13.
There is plenty on the line. The Nov. 3 ballot carries Louisiana's open U.S. Senate seat, where Republican Rep. Julia Letlow faces Democrat Jamie Davis. Letlow is widely considered the favorite, but two polls commissioned by the Davis campaign showed her ahead by only four points, within the margin of error. Every one of the state's six congressional seats is on the ballot too, along with ten proposed constitutional amendments. Those include Amendment 4, which would rewrite the governor's term limits, Amendment 8, on foreign adversaries and private property, and two measures aimed at property taxes for seniors.
Early voting runs Oct. 20 through Oct. 27, excluding Sunday, Oct. 25, from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. The deadline to request an absentee ballot, for voters other than military and overseas voters, is Oct. 30 at 4:30 p.m. On Election Day, polls are open from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Photo: Ktkvtsh / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
