When all else fails, cry voter suppression. That’s the mantra coming from those who support maintaining the status quo in New Orleans. The recall efforts against Mayor LaToya Cantrell are moving ahead and her defenders are getting nervous. They now accuse the Louisiana Republican Party of voter suppression because recall organizers want to clean up the voter registration rolls in order to have an accurate number needed for recall petition organizers. There is a problem with blaming Republicans, though. The recall organizers are Democrats.

For months I have wondered what the recall campaign in New Orleans was really about. It’s aim is to recall an ineffective Mayor. That I understand. I assumed after a recall, the politician most likely to benefit from the removal would be revealed. Then the real motive came out…

— Wendell Pierce (@WendellPierce) February 28, 2023

It’s a whole thread devoted to explaining the bad Republicans in Louisiana, though there is no evidence that Republicans are behind the mayor’s recall. Why let facts get in the way?

Recall organizers filed a lawsuit on February 16 that claims there are 33,000 ineligible people on the city’s active voter list. That number artificially inflates the target for recall organizers by about 6,500 signatures. The recall petition met the deadline and was presented on time. Monday was the last day for voters to ask for their names to be added or stricken from the recall petition. On Monday a six-hour hearing conducted by Civil District Court Judge Jennifer Medley ended in victory for organizers and their attorneys. She ruled that the lawsuit against Orleans Parish Registrar of Voters Sandra Wilson and Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin would not be tossed. This allows attorneys for both sides to begin arguing whether officials should be made to conduct a new voter canvass. A voter canvass is a slow and costly process that may delay the signature count by weeks.

The voter signature count is underway, with a March 22 deadline. Wilson’s office has a 20-business-day deadline to complete the count of signature sheets turned in by recall organizers on the Ash Wednesday deadline. The recall organizers claim they have enough signatures to force an up-or-down vote on whether or not Cantrell should remain in office. They have refused to say how many signatures they collected above the minimum 49,976 needed using the current active voter rolls. If the recall organizers only narrowly collected enough signatures, their lawsuit against Wilson and Ardoin could be key to their success.

To start the day, lawyers for Wilson and Ardoin argued that recall organizers had filed the wrong kind of lawsuit. The fast-tracked type of suit they filed is aimed at requiring government officials to perform their ordinary, mandatory duties. But lawyers for Ardoin and Wilson said the officials had already done the jobs they must.

Louisiana law only requires Ardoin’s office to record the number of active voters in its database on the day a recall petition is filed, and for Wilson to be guided by that number, they said, adding there’s no law requiring them to conduct a new voter canvass outside the regular May process.

After hearing arguments, Medley ruled that she would allow the case to proceed.

According to testimony by lead organizer Eileen Carter, “tens of thousands” of mailers the recall campaign sent out were returned with markings that the people were dead or had moved out of the parish. This caused the recall organizers to ask that, in order to have an accurate number of how many signatures are needed for a recall, the active voter rolls be scrubbed. State officials argued against Carter’s request.

State Commissioner of Elections Sherri Wharton Hadskey, a top Ardoin aide, followed Carter on the stand. She defended the voter lists, arguing that while people are constantly moving, dying, or making changes to their registration, officials are doing everything required by law to keep the lists up to date.

“Yes, the voter rolls, to my knowledge, are accurate,” Hadskey said. “Nothing has been presented to me to say otherwise.”

Wilson, the Orleans Parish registrar, was ready to testify Tuesday but the hearing never happened. Judge Medley cleared the courtroom and postponed the hearing. It was later learned that the parties involved were trying to negotiate a settlement.

According to the sources, the deal between recall leaders and the secretary of state would aim to resolve the lawsuit by establishing the active voter count on the petition’s filing date of Aug. 26, 2022.

Although Wilson is a defendant, the negotiations center on the secretary of state’s role in the process, according to another source familiar with the negotiations. In court, Wilson’s lawyers have maintained that she must rely on the count provided to her by Ardoin’s office.

Secretary of State Ardoin is a Republican. Since few details of the potential deal had filtered out, the fact that a deal was being negotiated at all was enough to spark an outcry from Cantrell’s campaign. It spurred questions of whether the public would see it as a Republican attack on a Democrat administration. That doesn’t ring true, though, since both of the lead organizers of the recall are Democrats, one of whom formerly worked for Cantrell at City Hall.

Carter and Batiste are both registered Democrats who say the recall is a cross-party effort to remove an incompetent mayor. But their largest financial backer is a Republican campaign donor, Rick Farrell, and their lead lawyer in court this week, Laura Cannizzaro Rodrigue, helped found a political group called the Bayou Mama Bears that is closely aligned with Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry.

Carvin and a national expert on recalls, Joshua Spivak, said that if a legal settlement pushes the recall over its threshold, the short-term victory could carry long-term peril for the anti-Cantrell campaign, which would still have to win an up-or-down vote on her fate.

“That should be a real good issue for the mayor,” said Spivak, noting that allegations of backroom deals have been a feature of American politics since the 19th century. “It’s always one that gets people’s attention, so in this case I would assume that could help the mayor change the trajectory. Whether that does enough is another story.”

On it goes. Now we wait and see if a deal is reached. Meanwhile, let the Cantrell apologists cry voter suppression. Maintaining clean voter rolls is basic good government. Cleaning up active voter rolls may be a by-product of this recall effort.