A major tweak that the Louisiana Legislature should make to its recent changes to candidate qualifying for certain offices would prevent “sore losers” from trying to game the system.
Earlier this year, the state instituted semi-closed primary elections to determine partisan general election candidates, essentially nominating them for office. Starting in 2026, this will apply to all federal legislative candidates as well as members of plenary statewide executive and judicial bodies. The law will make parties award nominations thus eligibility to run in the general election using their labels, where they can be joined by candidates not from a recognized party – currently the two major plus Greens, Libertarian, and Independent – on the general election ballot. In these primaries, only party members and any no party registrants who choose only on party’s ballot may participate.
But the law doesn’t prevent someone from running in a party primary who loses then to run in the general election under any label other than recognized parties’ or as no party. This subverts the idea of preventing other parties’ registrants to determine a party’s sole general election participant, even if the loser runs under another or without a label.
In American election law, three approaches try to prohibit this end-around for defeated partisan candidates. One requires candidate qualification some time prior to party primaries as a non-recognized partisan in order to participate in the general election. However, these kinds of laws run into constitutional problems because the judiciary sees excessive time gaps between qualifying and electing as beyond administrative needs (such as ballot preparation) thus becoming impediments to electoral participation, and have ruled such laws unconstitutional. If implemented in Louisiana, the months-long gap for regular elections between primary and general almost certainly would cause such a restriction to be declared unconstitutional.
A variation to this stands on much firmer ground. Disaffiliation statutes create a prior time limit that a person must have registered with a party to vote in order to participate in that party’s primary, as a voter or to qualify as a candidate (the state can link the two by requiring qualification under the label as registered prior to the disaffiliation length). If a prospective candidate does not choose a party label by then, he cannot run in the primary and his only option is to run in the general election not using the label of a party that had a primary for nomination.
Previous judicial rulings have invalidated a length of 23 months, calling this disenfranchisement, but have accepted a length as long as a year. Thus, if Louisiana were to enact something like this, that would mean a candidate would have to have register under a recognized party label a year before the primary election and subsequently couldn’t switch to an unrecognized or no party label for the general election.
Note also that a broad disaffiliation statute could solve the problem of “party shopping” among voters. As things stand, a partisan voter who wishes to influence another party’s nomination could switch a month before the election to no party and vote in that party’s primary, then back. Such a statute would minimize the amount of “raiding” that could go on subjected onto the major parties.
Finally, the law very simply could declare that any candidate who runs in a partisan primary cannot then qualify to run in the general election in the fall using another or no label. Even something as simple as an attestation at qualifying that the qualifier must abide the results of the primary legally could prevent sore losers from running in the general election.
Maybe best would be a disaffiliation statute covering both voters and candidates and an explicit sore loser law. Expect introduction of legislation to these effects to come as soon as this year’s regular legislative session.
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