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louisiana
GOP Governor Landry Blasted for Throwing Out 45,000 Votes in Louisiana With a 'Smirk and a Chuckle’
"It’s not a big deal," Landry said after casually announcing that legally cast ballots were "discarded" after he suspended elections.
May 12, 2026
Louisiana's Republican Gov. Jeff Landry is facing criticism over his blasé admission that tens of thousands of Louisianans would have their legally cast ballots thrown out after he suspended the state's primary elections.
Landry signed an executive order suspending the state's May 16 and June 27 primaries immediately after the US Supreme Court’s landmark decision in late April, which held that the state’s maps guaranteeing districts representing the state's Black residents constituted “an unconstitutional racial gerrymander."
The ruling in Louisiana v. Callais effectively destroyed Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and set the stage for the GOP to draw new districts that could totally wipe out the electoral power of Louisiana's Black population, which makes up about one-third of the state, and do the same across the country.
Declaring a "state of emergency," the governor announced that elections were suspended just as early voting was set to begin, leading many to conclude that the right-wing high court's ruling was timed to allow Republicans to maximize their power as they enter this year's midterms.
In an interview with "60 Minutes" on Sunday night, Landry was asked by anchor Cecilia Vega about the unprecedented decision to suspend the election and what would happen to the roughly 45,000 mail ballots cast before the order went into effect.
Landry contended that he had no choice but to suspend the elections because "we don't have a map that our voters can vote on" as a result of the court's ruling.
Vega noted that during times of much greater strife, including "during the Civil War, during two world wars, elections still went on."
"We'll have an election, and we're actually going to have an election on Election Day," Landry responded, in an apparent shot at those who cast their votes early.
"But voting was already happening," Vega said. "More than 45,000 ballots have been returned. What happens to those?"
Landry said, "Those ballots are discarded, and those voters will vote again in November." (Notably, Landry's order does not delay primary elections until November, but until July 15 or whenever the legislature enacts new maps.)
Vega responded with incredulity at the governor's casual acknowledgment that the state would simply throw out tens of thousands of legally cast votes.
“You say that like it’s not a big deal,” she said.
“Well, it’s not a big deal,” Landry responded. “It’s not my fault. If anyone has a grievance, take it to the United States Supreme Court.”
The voting rights-focused news outlet Democracy Docket responded to Landry on social media: "It is a big deal to the 45,000 voters whose ballots you trashed. It’s also your fault."
They echoed the words of Rep. Cleo Fields (D-La.), whose majority Black 6th congressional district in Baton Rouge is expected to be chopped up by the GOP, and who has joined a lawsuit with other candidates hoping to stop Landry's suspension of elections.
“The Supreme Court ruled that the map that you created, that this legislature created, and this governor signed, was illegal,” Fields said to Landry on Monday. "The Supreme Court did not say, ‘Throw away those ballots.’"
The decision to suspend Louisiana’s primary comes amid a multi-pronged assault on voting rights coming from the administration of President Donald Trump, who has himself repeatedly floated the idea of canceling elections and praised Landry for “moving so quickly” to block his constituents from voting.
But many were particularly shocked at Landry's apparent ho-hum attitude toward mass disenfranchisement.
Civil rights attorney and public defender Scott Hechinger marveled at the “governor of Louisiana throwing out 45,000 votes with a smug smirk and a chuckle.”
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Justice Jackson Condemns Supreme Court's Decision to Fast-Track Louisiana Electoral Map Ruling
The Monday evening decision "is tantamount to an approval of Louisiana’s rush to pause the ongoing election in order to pass a new map."
May 05, 2026
Warning that the US Supreme Court's right-wing majority was appearing to give its approval of Louisiana's decision to suspend federal primary elections in the state following the court's ruling on the state's congressional map last week, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Monday evening was the lone dissenter as the court agreed to immediately finalize the ruling instead of waiting the customary 32 days.
By expediting the ruling, suggested Jackson, the court was taking an obviously political stance in support of efforts to ensure Louisiana Republicans can quickly redraw the state's congressional map to yield more electoral wins for the GOP.
"The court’s decision to buck our usual practice," wrote Jackson, "is tantamount to an approval of Louisiana’s rush to pause the ongoing election in order to pass a new map."
Ordinarily, the court would wait 32 days to transmit an opinion to the lower courts, giving the losing party time to request that the justices reconsider the case.
In a brief, unsigned opinion Monday evening, the court said that the Black voters who had defended the state's 2024 congressional map at the center of Louisiana v. Callais had "not expressed any intent to ask this court to reconsider its judgment.”
In Louisiana v. Callais last week, the court ruled along ideological lines that the 2024 map—which was drawn to better represent the population of Louisiana, where one-third of residents are Black—was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The ruling effectively struck down the last remaining provision of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which held that voters of color can challenge racially discriminatory electoral maps.
The map that was struck down ensured there were two majority-minority districts in the state. Louisiana's Republican-controlled legislature is expected to try to eliminate at least one of those districts, with a new map yielding five Republicans and one Democrat in the US House.
In transmitting last week's ruling to the lower courts without delay, the court granted a request from the group of white voters who had challenged the state's map.
"Because it is for the District Court to either draw an interim remedial map or approve a legislative remedy, jurisdiction should be returned to the District Court as soon as possible so that it can oversee an orderly process," wrote the plaintiffs.
The Supreme Court granted the plaintiffs' request days after Republican Gov. Jeff Landry took executive action to suspend the state's US House primaries in an effort to ensure they take place after the new map is drawn.
That action, wrote Jackson on Monday, had "a strong political undercurrent" that the court's latest move appeared to openly endorse.
"Louisiana’s hurried response to the Callais decision unfolds in the midst of an ongoing statewide election, against the backdrop of a pitched redistricting battle among state governments that appear to be acting as proxies for their favored political parties," wrote Jackson, noting that the court has only expedited a decision twice in the last 25 years. "As always, the court has a choice... To avoid the appearance of partiality here, we could, as per usual, opt to stay on the sidelines and take no position by applying our default procedures."
"But, today, the court chooses the opposite. Not content to have decided the law, it now takes steps to influence its implementation," she wrote.
John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said that the court was going against its practice of following the "Purcell doctrine," which came out of a 2006 Supreme Court order and holds that "courts should not change voting or election rules too close to an election in order to avoid confusion for voters and election officials alike."
The Supreme Court, said Bisognano, "decided to inject itself into an ongoing election and at this point no one can say otherwise."
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Evacuation Must Start Now as Climate-Driven Rising Gulf Slowly Drowns New Orleans: Study
"Coastal Louisiana has evidently already crossed the point of no return," says new research.
May 04, 2026
A study published Monday warns that New Orleans must immediately begin planning and gradually implementing its permanent evacuation to avert a dangerously rushed exodus later, because it has passed a "point of no return" as climate-driven sea-level rise slowly swallows the storied city.
"With global temperatures poised to exceed the 1.5°C Paris Agreement threshold—a level that triggered substantial ice sheet collapse during the Last Interglacial—low-elevation coastal zones face sea-level commitments far beyond current planning horizons," says the study, which was published by the journal Nature Sustainability.
"With this geological frame of reference, we examine the impact of sea-level rise on what may be the most physically vulnerable coastal zone in the world using prehistoric and contemporary patterns of human mobility," the publication continues. "We highlight the positive aspects of the recently commenced out-migration in this region and argue that the fate of communities landwards of this coastal zone will be decided in the next few decades."
"While climate mitigation should remain the first step to prevent the worst outcomes, coastal Louisiana has evidently already crossed the point of no return,” the paper adds.
That's because rising waters are slowly eroding Louisiana's coast, including New Orleans, which “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century," according to the study's authors.
“Louisiana is a canary in the coal mine. It is one of the rare places where we’re already clearly seeing climate-motivated depopulation combined with other social and economic factors,” said Yale School of the Environment professor and study co-author Brianna Castro.
The authors argued that by acknowledging the inevitability of New Orleans' underwater future, government and residents can avert a fraught rushed retreat by planning and executing a managed multigenerational relocation and set an example for other threatened coastal communities.
According to one widely cited study published a decade ago, around 13 million Americans living in coastal areas could be forced to relocate to higher ground by the end of the century due climate-driven sea-level rise, with the Gulf Coast and Florida expected lose the most livable land. Globally, hundreds of millions of people are expected to be displaced by 2100 due to rising seas.
After Hurricane Katrina—which inundated the city and killed nearly 1,000 people in the New Orleans metro area—billions of dollars were spent fortifying the city's levee system, which failed catastrophically during the 2005 storm. However, experts warn that in the long term, levees won't be able to stop the rising waters any longer.
That's why the study's authors said officials must begin the city's orderly depopulation as soon as possible.
"What kind of retreat do you want?" asked Castro. "Do you want to incentivize it and then people go naturally for jobs, housing, and lifestyle amenities—or do you want people to wait and then have to leave abruptly in crisis?”
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