Clancy DuBos: Cantrell recall effort holds lessons for all

Despite all its foibles and failures, the effort to recall Mayor LaToya Cantrell gave citizens and public officials across Louisiana a major civics lesson. It also exposed significant gaps in state laws governing recalls, voter registration, transparency and judicial ethics.

Those are among the many takeaways from the NoLaToya adventure in democracy. Here’s a closer look.

1. State laws need more clarity. Here’s where the civics lesson hits home everywhere in Louisiana. Lawmakers need to close the following obvious statutory gaps — and identify others:

• The law makes no provision for auditing registrars’ rolls, nor does it provide oversight authority (which should lie with the Secretary of State) or accountability for registrars who fail to properly maintain their rolls.
• The five-day “grace period” is confusing and serves no meaningful purpose. It makes Louisiana an outlier, and lawmakers should get rid of it.
• The validation process needs improvement. Why not require petition organizers to turn in signatures every few weeks, or monthly? That would allow registrars to validate signatures in real time — and increase transparency.
• I’m a public records hawk, but making signatures subject to immediate public review scares a lot of people. Lawmakers should consider making petitions a public record after the registrar has completed the entire validation process.

2. The signature bar remains high. Lawmakers recently lowered the signature threshold in the largest parishes from 33% of active voters to 20%, but that’s still a very high bar. Perhaps the law should require signatures from half-plus-one of the number of votes cast in the targeted official’s last election. For officials elected without opposition, keep the current percentages. It shouldn’t be impossible to recall an elected official; nor should it be easy.

3. To paraphrase James Carville, it’s a campaign, stupid. Recalling a high-ranking elected official requires the same level of planning, organization, voter ID, polling, financing, PR, messaging and advertising that getting elected requires. And those things need to be in place before filing a recall notice with the Secretary of State, not months later. A recall drive also needs credibility. That only happens when it has a public-facing campaign committee composed of business, civic and neighborhood leaders who reflect the community.

4. Transparency matters. The lack of it matters more. The recallers promised voters their signatures would remain secret until the petitions were turned in, but state law makes all signatures public record immediately. Recall organizers shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. The NoLaToya folks also lost credibility by reneging on an agreement to turn over all signatures to The Times-Picayune upon delivering the petition to the registrar on Feb. 22. Elsewhere, Orleans Parish Registrar Sandra Wilson refused even to explain the legally required process for verifying signatures when she received the petition, needlessly keeping citizens in the dark. Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin — with virtually no explanation — lowered the signature threshold by 5,000 after reducing the official tally of active voters in New Orleans by 25,000. In the petition drive’s final weeks, Cantrell mailed voters, at taxpayers’ expense, a slick flyer touting her accomplishments, then slow-walked the response to public records requests about it. And then there’s Judge Jennifer Medley …

5. She did WHAT? Civil District Court Judge Medley presided over a lawsuit brought by petition organizers in February but didn’t disclose that she’d signed the petition in December. That raises all manner of ethical issues that, ultimately, will have to be resolved by the Louisiana Supreme Court. The recall may be over, but this controversy isn’t.

6. Cantrell didn’t win — the recall organizers lost. The mayor deserves no victory lap, but don’t be surprised if she treats herself to one anyway. What else should we expect from a public official who thinks she’s entitled to fly first class and to live in a city-owned Pontalba apartment at taxpayer expense? From day one, the recallers ran an amateurish campaign despite spending nearly as much as Cantrell spent to win her first term as mayor. In fairness, recall organizers got most of their $1.2 million in contributions months after launching the petition drive last August. (See No. 3 above.)

7. Where do we go from here? Like it or not, New Orleans goes wherever its mayor leads. If Cantrell checks out or remains embroiled in controversy and scandal, the city will continue to founder on the shoals of stagnation and incompetence — which is bad for all of Louisiana. Though it’s not in her nature to be conciliatory, it’s Cantrell’s job to unite the city and put political grudges aside for the greater good.

Veteran pollster Dr. Silas Lee, a sociology professor at Xavier University, put it best: “We still have a crisis of confidence right now. That’s the mayor’s biggest challenge.”

That’s a lesson for all elected officials who find themselves embroiled in a recall.

Clancy DuBos is Gambit’s political editor. You can reach him at clancy@gambitweekly.com.