On May 9, the last day of early voting in Louisiana, Ilyssa Parker was waiting for the rain to stop when she realized the polling location near her home on New Orleans’ Westbank was about to close.
She went over her ballot one last time and raced down to the Algiers Courthouse, where she voted for local judges, the U.S. Senate primary and five state constitutional amendments.
But there was a problem. She only saw three amendments on her ballot.
"I could have sworn I had read five,” Parker said. “And then I thought, ‘Well, maybe I was wrong.’”
A self-described civically engaged voter, Parker said she scrolled over her ballot carefully to make sure she hadn't missed anything. The screen showed nothing. When she submitted her vote, no warning flag appeared telling her she had skipped races.
"I still keep questioning if maybe I missed something, I did something wrong," Parker said. "But then that worries me too, because I feel like I'm a pretty thorough person. So if I missed it, I'm feeling like this probably could have happened to other people as well."
After leaving the polling station, Parker reached out to her friend and neighbor, Diana Masters, who had voted earlier the same day at the same Algiers Point courthouse. She also noticed something strange about her ballot.
Before going to the polling station, she went to Louisiana’s Secretary of State website, input her voter information and printed out a sample copy of her ballot to mark up and bring with her. But the ballot she printed from the state’s website didn’t match her ballot at the polls.
The two compared ballots over the phone. They’re both registered Democrats living in the same neighborhood. Masters said she had five amendments on hers, but it also had a U.S. House primary race — another mistake after recent developments.
This primary race had been suspended by Gov. Jeff Landry a week prior, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais — which made the state’s congressional map unconstitutional due to racial gerrymandering.
Landry’s decision was made just days before early voting was set to start on May 2. It not only caused the discrepancies that Parker and Masters experienced — Parker did not have the congressional race on her ballot — but also brought into question the validity of more than 40,000 absentee ballots that had already been received for the race. Landry later said those votes would not be counted in the May 16 election during an interview on “60 Minutes.”
“I'm really frustrated,” Masters said. “It just feels like the state is making a concerted effort to disenfranchise voters. It just feels like they're trying to rip away people's voice.”
The chaos comes during what is already one of the most complicated elections in Louisiana's recent history. The state has operated under a "jungle primary" for most of the past five decades, in which all candidates appear on a single ballot regardless of party.
Switching parties
This cycle, the state legislature switched a subset of races, including the U.S. Senate, to a closed partisan primary, meaning only registered members of a given party can vote in that party's race.
Voters registered as the independent “No Party” option have to choose from the Republican or Democratic primary in order to cast a vote.
That change put incumbent Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy in a bind.
Facing a primary electorate dominated by President Donald Trump loyalists — and the lasting anger of the president, who never forgave Cassidy for voting to convict him in his second impeachment trial — the senator spent weeks making an unusual public appeal: he urged Democrats to switch their party registration to No Party, and No Party voters to declare a Republican ballot, so they could vote for him in the closed primary.
His two biggest opponents, state Treasurer John Fleming and Trump-endorsed Rep. Julia Letlow, did not make a similar push.
The effort drew criticism from conservatives who called it proof that Cassidy wasn't a real Republican. It also, according to prominent Louisiana political commentator and LSU professor emeritus Robert Mann, telegraphed just how precarious Cassidy's position had become. Mann said Cassidy personally called about a month ago to ask him to advocate for Democrats to make the switch.
"You don't call somebody like me if you're not really worried that you're going to miss the runoff," Mann said. "He realized the only way he was going to have a chance at finishing in the top two in this primary was to get Democrats to bail him out."
While the exact number of Democratic voters who switched to No Party to vote for Cassidy is unclear, Mann said the effort has not “borne a lot of fruit” and is unlikely to reshape the race in Cassidy’s favor.
Still, some Democratic voters, including Matt Bailey, a Jefferson Parish resident, did make the switch.
It’s an “imperfect decision,” Bailey said, but as a member of the “political minority,” he wanted his vote to “count for something.” For him, that meant choosing Cassidy — a candidate more likely to win and more likely to stand up to President Trump.
"Congress is not serving its constitutional function right now," Bailey said. "It's not serving as a check and balance on the executive branch, and so I think it's important that we elect a senator who will be more likely to live into that purpose."
Bailey, a registered Democrat since roughly 2002, said his experience at the polls was smooth. He understood the form, knew to check the Republican box and voted without incident.
A ‘Red Alert’ message
On Friday, the eve of election day, Cassidy issued a "Red Alert” email, saying that “because of the Jeff Landry election process mess — voters are being disenfranchised and are not able to vote Cassidy.”
On a press call, Cassidy described calls flooding his office from voters registered as “No Party” who had tried to vote for him but couldn't. One voter, he said, told him he felt “disenfranchised” because he wasn’t able to receive a ballot that included the Republican primary.
“Too many people are telling us that they're having difficulty, and in some cases, not getting the vote for me even though they intended,” he said.
He described the same problem playing out with mail-in ballots. No Party voters who requested absentee ballots received a letter telling them to write back to request a partisan ballot — an extra step that Cassidy, drawing on his background as a physician, said follows a predictable pattern.
"Every time, if you tell somebody to get your pills, you have to go get a receipt first, about 20% of people won't get the receipt, so they won't get their pills," he said. "The more steps you put in, the less likely the end result occurs."
Cassidy said he spoke with Secretary of State Nancy Landry about the problem, who he said told him that voters who entered a booth and found no Senate candidates could step back out and ask for a different ballot. But Cassidy said most people don't know that's allowed.
The Secretary of State’s office has not responded to repeated attempts for interviews or statements with the Gulf States Newsroom.
Widespread confusion
Masters, who said the congressional race was on her ballot, voted in it anyway “just to show that we're here and we wanna vote for this race.”
She also said she's seen real confusion on social media about whether any election is happening at all.
“That's a huge problem. People can't exercise their civic rights if they don't understand that the election is proceeding,” she said.
Bailey, a drummer, said he wore his early-voting sticker to a gig in Lafayette after early voting. He said he was stopped by people who were shocked he had voted at all.
"Multiple people came up to me and said, 'Oh, you voted? I thought the election was canceled,'" he said. "I had multiple people say, 'How did you vote? I didn't think we could vote.'"
He said the widespread confusion has consequences that go beyond this one race.
"Louisiana already has really low voter turnout, generally speaking," Bailey said. "When things like this happen to disrupt the process, it further discourages civic engagement and makes people think, 'My vote doesn't matter.'
“That’s just incredibly unfortunate, especially at a time when we need more citizen engagement in civic and political life rather than less."
Mann, the LSU professor, said that's exactly what he expects to see reflected in turnout figures Saturday. The Secretary of State had projected a turnout of around 20% to 25% — a dramatic drop from roughly 50% in the last contested Senate election.
"When voters are confused, they often just don't vote," Mann said.
He also predicted the downstream effects of the Callais ruling would add more confusion in the fall, when congressional races are expected to run under a different format — an open primary — while the Senate runoff, if there is one, would remain closed.
"The legislature and Gov. Landry have created a system that is almost designed in a lab to discourage people from participating in the electoral process," Mann said. "Voters should not only be confused and apathetic, I think they should be angry that the legislature and the governor have treated them with such disdain."
This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.
