Louisiana Voice

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

That’s the approach of State Rep. Blake Miguez (R-Erath) who has pre-filed House Bill 20 again this year after seeing the bill vetoed by Gov. John Bel Edwards last year

The bill, which passed the legislature in the 2020 special session mostly on a party-line vote, would have blocked millions of dollars in grants to local election officials through a nonprofit supported by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

A state district court helped keep Attorney Gen. Jeff Landry’s losing streak intact last October with a RULING that likewise thwarted attempts at halting funds from the nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life which said it was offering the grants to help local leaders conduct elections during the coronavirus pandemic.

Somehow, in the minds of Miguez, Landry and their ilk, dark money in support of a candidate or party is just fine but non-partisan funding to assist officials in conducting elections somehow throws the entire democratic process into crisis mode.

Zuckerberg funded the grants with a $300 million donation to the nonprofit and followed up with an additional $100 million.

Local officials across the state applied for nearly $8 million in grant money after being informed of the availability of the funds by Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin. Parish clerks and voter registrars said they would use the money for personal protective gear and wages for workers staffing voting sites for longer hours.

As a stark illustration of how Repugnantcans think as a herd as opposed to individually, Ardoin initially encouraged grant applications by local officials but as soon the Repugnantcan Party and Landry voiced opposition, he quickly switched positions.

Landry maintained in his lawsuit that private money going to public entities to run elections would have a “corrosive influence.” The suit named as defendants the Center for Tech and Civic Life and Dawn Cole, a lobbyist who helped connect local officials to the grant money.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life called such lawsuits “frivolous” and attorneys for Cole said the lawsuit’s allegations were “little more than unfounded statements suggesting that the nonprofit corporations are somehow attempting to taint the election process” and that Landry’s claims were “nothing more than a scare tactic aimed at preventing local election officials from gaining additional funding to assist with the workload, increased voter turnout and added burdens posed by COVID-19.”

So now, Miguez is back with HOUSE BILL 20 because Repugnantcans somehow fear that outside help in holding elections might encourage participation by more people, people they can’t control – something the National Repugnantcan Party has openly admitted it dreads more than anything else.

It’s not that the Repugnantcans don’t want outside money going into elections; the dark money that is poured into both parties’ campaigns is ample evidence of that. In fact, I’m still receiving solicitations from the National Repugnantcan Party every single day in my email in-box and for nearly three months after the election, I was getting up to 20 email solicitations per day from the Trump organization (I still don’t know how I, of all people, got on their mailing lists).

So, its evident that the Repugs are not against money in elections; they just don’t want money going to aid in holding election when they can’t control the purse strings.

All you have to do is look at the vote last year on Miguez’s HB51 to see how the vote was split along party lines. The final vote in the Senate was 25-11 in favor with all 25 votes cast by Republicans. Only one Republican, Sen. Rogers Pope of Denham Springs, voted nay. It was the same in the House with only one Democrat, Francis Thompson of Delhi, being among the 66 votes in favor while all 28 negative votes were cast by Democrats.

The bottom line for Miguez and his Repugnantcan cohorts is if private funds are being used for non-partisan purposes, it must be stopped. Only money designated for a particular political party, preferably dark money, is welcome.

Partisan campaign contributions are democracy at work to people like Landry and Miguez. Non-partisan financial support of the electoral process, however, means the sky is falling.