Is Louisiana Being Set Up for California-Style Mail-In Ballot Fraud?

Guest post by Christopher Alexander

BATON ROUGE, LA — Louisiana voters who think their state’s elections are fully secure need to look closer at what has been happening under the radar in Baton Rouge.

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Since Secretary of State Nancy Landry took office following her 2023 election, a systematic dismantling of mail-in ballot safeguards has been quietly codified into law. If this trend continues, Louisiana could soon mirror states like California, where loose mail-in voting regulations open the door to massive vulnerabilities and days of post-election counting.

To understand the threat, one must understand how a mail-in ballot works. The ballot itself does not contain the voter’s name; once it is removed from the envelope, it is anonymous. Therefore, any fraud must be caught at the envelope verification stage. If a fraudulent envelope passes inspection, the illegal vote inside is counted, and the damage cannot be undone.

Yet, a look at the legislative track record since 2024 reveals a disturbing pattern of watering down these exact verifications.

2024: The Bait-and-Switch Routine

In 2024, the dismantling began with a classic bait-and-switch routine involving two major bills:

HB 581 (Act 712) by Polly Thomas: This bill ostensibly added a requirement for a witness’s mailing address to be included on the ballot envelope. Common sense, right? Except a loophole was quietly amended into R.S. 18:1315(B), stating: “Failure to include a witness’s mailing address on an absentee ballot certificate shall not be grounds to challenge an absentee by mail ballot.” The bill created a security requirement and immediately declared that violating it carries zero consequences. Why?

SB 226 (Act 321) by Heather Cloud: This was designed to automatically challenge ballots missing required information. However, another crucial carve-out was added to 18:1315(C): “However, an absentee by mail ballot shall not be deemed challenged solely because the voter indicates on the absentee by mail certificate that he does not know his mother’s maiden name.” By eliminating the requirement for this vital piece of identifying information, a primary layer of fraud prevention was neutralized. Why?

2025: Outsourcing Voter Roll AccuracyADVERTISEMENT

In 2025, Rep. Beau Beaullieu carried the Secretary of State’s Omnibus Election Bill, HB 592 (Act 386). Buried inside the 45-page document were significant changes to Louisiana law regarding eligibility to register to vote.

Prior to HB 592, the law relied heavily on the United States Postal Service (USPS) for address data verification during the annual canvass. The new law introduced language allowing the Secretary of State to enter into agreements with private vendors for voter registration eligibility and address data.

Because the new law uses flexible “and/or” language, the state is no longer strictly bound to federal or state agency verifications. Instead, a third-party private vendor could potentially become the sole gatekeeper of voter roll accuracy—raising serious questions about accountability, data privacy, and the potential for outsourced corruption.

2026: The Midnight Raid on the “Printed Name” Requirement

HB 842 by Rep. Beaullieu in 2026 perhaps best highlights the lengths to which some lawmakers will go to pass these changes. The bill provided that a witness’s failure to provide a printed name or address should not be considered a deficiency requiring a cure.

If a witness’s printed name is optional, the only remaining safeguards are the voter and witness signatures—both of which can easily be forged or scribbled, as signature matching is not routinely or rigorously enforced. There is simply nothing that stops a bad actor from posing, by way of forged signatures, as both the voter and the witness on a mail-in ballot. This should alarm every voter in Louisiana.

Responding to grassroots concerns, Rep. Beryl Amedee successfully passed an amendment to the bill to ensure the “printed name” requirement remained strictly mandatory for legibility.

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However, after the bill moved through the Senate and headed to a conference committee—consisting of Reps. Beaullieu, Thomas, and Wilder, alongside Sens. Kleinpeter, Miller, and Womack—the rules were suspended. The conference committee stripped Rep. Amedee’s security amendment out of the bill and rushed the final version through both chambers in the closing hours without notifying the House floor of the changes.

A Wake-Up Call for Louisiana Voters

All of this begs the question: Why does there appear to be a systematic, coordinated effort by Republican leadership to make it easier to cast unverified absentee ballots? Why the backroom maneuvers and rule-suspensions to remove simple, common-sense legibility and identity checks?

Not only must citizens be on the look-out for any new legislation in 2027 that further erodes existing guardrails regarding absentee voting, every legislator who reflexively did the bidding of our Secretary of State and either authored, co-authored, or voted for the legislation cited herein should be unfavorably remembered on these issues by their voters at re-election time.

Louisiana citizens deserve better, and must demand better. Nothing short of total transparency from the Secretary of State and total security in our voting process is acceptable. When the next legislative session rolls around, voters must watch for new pushes to expand mail-in and absentee voting access. If the guardrails continue to be removed while the volume of mail-in ballots increases, Louisiana will be on the fast track to the same election chaos seen in California.

Stay tuned for the LACAG comprehensive annual legislative scorecard, coming soon to an inbox, social media platform, or mailbox near you. Through this broadly disseminated scorecard, citizens will see whether their legislators represented their interests, or the interests of somebody or something else entirely.

Christopher Alexander Louisiana Citizen Advocacy Group www.lacag.org