In an unusual move, Louisiana’s top election official wants a positive Covid-19 test if an absentee voter wants to vote on concerns about the virus. This is due to a lack of consistent access to testing in the state.
Louisiana is one of seven states that will require an apology to vote by mail this year, allowing absentee ballots only if a voter is 65 or older or meets certain other conditions, such as temporary absence from their county or hospitalization.
For their elections in July and August, Louisiana demanded restrictions for voters who were at risk of developing complications from Covid-19 or who had potential exposure to the virus. But under Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin’s proposal for the November and December state elections released on Monday, these accommodations will not apply. Instead, a voter would have to test positive for Covid-19 between the end of early voting and election day, currently a week-long period to use the excuse for hospitalization to request a mail-in vote.
Ardoin’s proposal, a Republican, comes because Louisiana has seen delays in testing, meaning a voter could be tested and her results did not have time to request a post-a vote. Louisiana has so far seen 138,485 cases of Covid-19 and 4,526 deaths. In April, African Americans accounted for 70% of Covid-19 deaths in the state.
The proposal would “thousands” of eligible Louisiana voters be unable to vote by mail and ignore the limited availability of tests, said Zachery Morris, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which the state submits about its preparations. in November.
“Limiting the need for emergency security voting to the exclusion exclusively for persons who test positive for Covid-19 during and after the early voting period, but before election day is an explanatory narrow classification,” he said.
Ardoin’s plan allows 10 days of early voting and would add an additional 1.5 hours before the election to be open each day, less than the 13 days of early voting the state is offering this summer, according to the Associated Press.
Louisiana does not normally see large numbers of voters casting ballots and Ardoin wrote in the proposal that there was simply no time to expand the program for November and would lead to voter confusion. The state currently has a federal lawsuit from voting rights groups that earlier this month said it did not do enough to protect voters for this November election.
“While most other states are expanding safe voting options for the November election, Louisiana is declining,” said Ashley Shelton, executive director of the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, a civic action group that is one of the plaintiffs in the case. .
This approach is stricter than some other states when it comes to restricting voting rights. Alabama, Arkansas and Kentucky, for example, require voters to produce an acceptable excuse to ask to vote by mail, but all three states have said concerns about Covid-19 will be an acceptable excuse for the fall. But in his recommendation, Ardoin noted that very few voters used Covid-19 as an excuse to vote by mail in elections this year. In the state elections in July, just 2,810 of the 164,296 voters who cast an absentee ballot called Covid-19 as an excuse. More than 90% of voters who used post-vote in July, noted Ardoin, were 65 years or older.
Ardoin’s proposal has yet to be approved by the Louisiana legislature, where Republicans control both chambers, and Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards is a Democrat.
“The reality is that the legislature is Republican for a majority and I had to come up with a plan that could be passed on pragmatically and at the same time adapt to the needs that I saw,” Ardoin told the USA Today network. “A good number of Republicans who voted for the latest plan said they could not do so again because circumstances have changed.”
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