Efforts by Louisiana officials to block millions of dollars in private grants from reaching local registrar’s offices have been rebuffed in recent weeks, despite concerns that the funds would be a partisan threat to fair and free elections.
Last month, Judge Lewis Pitman threw out a lawsuit filed by state Attorney General Jeff Landry that sought to block local election offices from receiving grants from the nonprofit Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL), which has received hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The use of private grants for county clerks and registrars runs contrary to the state constitution, according to Landry’s complaint.
“The attorney general brings this suit on behalf of the state of Louisiana … to prevent the injection of unregulated private money into the Louisiana election system and to protect the integrity of elections in the state by ensuring against the corrosive influence of outside money on Louisiana election officials,” the complaint filed by Landry on Oct. 2 states.
Private grants used in this way are likely to be the work of political parties or corporations with partisan agendas, the lawsuit states, and Louisiana statutes do not provide a means for local clerks to receive such funds.
But Landry’s office downplayed the significance of Pitman’s decision, even as the state’s 2020 primary and general elections have come and gone.
“There are multiple defendants in the case,” Landry’s press secretary, Cory Dennis, said in a statement emailed to the Louisiana Record. “The judge’s decision dismissed two of those defendants, a lobbyist and her company, on a procedural matter.”
The Attorney General’s Office would be pressing for either a rehearing on the issue or an appeal, Dennis said.
“As for the merits of the case, nothing has been decided,” he said, “and CTCL remains in the case. We look forward to having our day in court.”
As the case in the state’s 16th Judicial District in St. Martin Parish was sidelined, the state legislature passed a bill to formally ban the acceptance of private grants for election operations during a state of emergency. Gov. John Bel Edwards, however, vetoed the legislation authored by Rep. Blake Miguez (R-Erath).
The grants from the CTCL could have been used to ensure the safety of polling places by funding sanitization and personal protective equipment, which were sorely needed throughout the state, Edwards said.
“House Bill 51 is an unnecessary political ploy that only serves to threaten the safety of polling places during a pandemic and increase the costs to taxpayers to administer safe elections,” the governor said in his veto message.
Critics, however, have charged that CTCL is selective in providing such grants and has been earmarking large amounts of money to regions dominated by Democrats in a bid to expand turnout only in those areas.