Red state gov immediately sued after suspending primary elections

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry suspended the May 16 primary elections for Louisiana’s six U.S. House seats Thursday, the day after the U.S. Supreme Court declared the state’s existing congressional map unconstitutional.

“Allowing elections to proceed under an unconstitutional map would undermine the integrity of our system and violate the rights of our voters,” Landry said in a written statement. “This executive order ensures we uphold the rule of law while giving the Legislature the time it needs to pass a fair and lawful congressional map.”

Absentee voting in the U.S. House races had already begun, and early voting was scheduled to start Saturday. But postponing the election allows Landry and the Louisiana Legislature to pass a new map that eliminates one or both of Louisiana’s two majority-Black congressional districts.

The Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s existing congressional map Wednesday when it ruled that lawmakers had relied too heavily on the race of voters to draw the district lines. Specifically, the court challenged the legality of an additional majority-Black congressional district held by U.S. Rep. Cleo Fields, a Black Democrat from Baton Rouge, that spans from Baton Rouge to Shreveport.

The U.S. House elections this week are canceled. But all the other contests on the May 16 ballot will continue as scheduled, including those for U.S. Senate, Louisiana Supreme Court, Public Service Commission, Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and five constitutional amendments.

Secretary of State Nancy Landry has said that the U.S. House races will remain on voters’ ballots in May, but any votes cast in those races will not be counted.

Democrats have already started filing legal challenges to the governor’s decision that aim to put the House elections back on their previous schedule.

Lindsay Garcia, a Democratic candidate in the 5th Congressional District, filed a lawsuit Thursday in the U.S. Middle District Court of Louisiana asking for an emergency order blocking Landry’s election suspension.

Black plaintiffs from the 2022 congressional redistricting lawsuit Robinson v. Ardoin have also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to wait to issue its certified judgment until after the 2026 midterms and allow the current map be used during this cycle. This typically happens about a month after the opinion is released.

Landry’s order pushes the primary elections to July 15 unless the Legislature determines a new date.

Assuming the elections remain suspended, the Louisiana Legislature will have to revert to the old “jungle” primary election system for the U.S. House races, Senate President Cameron Henry, R-Metairie, said in an interview Thursday. The state had been expected to use the new semi-closed partisan primary for these contests.

Under the semi-closed process, U.S. House candidates were running in Democratic-only and Republican-only elections, where voters could only cast ballots in the Democratic or Republican primary but not both.

Given the compressed timeline, however, the congressional elections will now likely be held through the jungle primary, where candidates of all parties run against each other in an initial contest. That system is both cheaper and less complicated to execute.

“Under the best of circumstances, the election cycle is going to be confusing,” Henry said. “But we are going to move forward with what we have to do.”

U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, a Black Democrat from New Orleans, faces a primary challenger and could be affected by both the Supreme Court ruling and the governor’s decision to move the primary dates.

He said the cancellation of the primaries will have a “chilling effect” on voters such as military veterans who have already cast their ballots. The governor and Attorney General Liz Murrill argue moving the election is necessary because the court’s ruling prohibits them from using the invalidated map.

At least one national election expert said Louisiana isn’t required to stop the elections because of the Supreme Court ruling.

Michael Li, senior counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice, an organization that advocates for voting rights across the country, disagreed with Murrill and Landry’s legal assessment that the primaries can’t be held using the current congressional map.

The Supreme Court’s ruling Wednesday does not throw out Louisiana’s existing congressional districts for the current cycle. A previous Supreme Court decision, Purcell v. Gonzales from 2006, prevents courts from ordering states to make major ballot changes too close to an election and would apply in this case, he said.

Louisiana had previously used maps for congressional elections after they were ruled unconstitutional in 2022 and 2024 on the basis of the court’s Purcell ruling.

But at a press conference Wednesday, Murrill acknowledged the legal precedent set by the Purcell case, pointing out that courts would be prohibited from ordering the state to do anything.

“The Purcell principle is a principle that says that courts, particularly federal courts, should not be monkeying with state election dates when it’s too close to an election, but it doesn’t stop the legislature from acting,” Murrill said. “So that’s a restriction on the authority of courts, not legislatures.”

Lawyers for the NAACP and other organizations argued the Supreme Court was doing just that by striking down the maps after some votes had already been cast.

“Enjoining the primary after ballots have already been cast would cause chaos in the election process and leave voters and candidates hopelessly confused, in clear violation of the principles this court articulated in Purcell and subsequent decisions,” they argued in a filing today with the U.S. Supreme Court.

Former Republican Secretary of State Jay Dardenne said he believed the governor and secretary of state’s plan was legal but unprecedented.

“I don’t think we’ve had a situation like this where, where you’ve got a Supreme Court ruling rendered, literally, a couple of days before voting starts,” Dardenne said. “So I think it’s probably an acceptable response to the reality of voting in a district that has been declared unconstitutional.”

“It seems to me that there’s sufficient time to have another election before then,” Dardenne added.