Early voting for the May 16 election began Saturday with confusion over whether all the races listed on the ballot are still taking place. 

Even motivated voters who showed up within the first few hours said they weren’t quite sure whether the U.S. House elections were still happening. 

“I went ahead and voted for who I wanted to vote for. If they don’t count it, that’s their problem,” said Betty Powers, who has participated in every election since 1968, outside an East Baton Rouge Parish polling location. 

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry suspended the U.S. House races Thursday, a day after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Louisiana’s House district map unconstitutional. 

Republican Secretary of State Nancy Landry, who is not related to the governor, has said votes cast in Louisiana’s U.S. House races won’t be counted. But that didn’t deter several early voters from picking a House candidate on their ballot anyway. 

“Something is delayed … but I don’t know if it affects East Baton Rouge Parish or not,” said Valerie Amato, who wore a shirt with the picture of President Donald Trump and the slogan ‘I’m still here’ to her polling location. She said she voted for a U.S. House candidate out of habit. 

Mail-in ballots with U.S. House races listed had already been sent out by the time the governor declared the election was off. Nancy Landry’s office also didn’t have enough notice to remove the affected candidates’ names from the ballots before in-person voting started. 

“[The House race] was still on there, so we voted for it,” said Evan Delahaye, a Baton Rouge resident who voted early with his brother.

“I am worried we’re going to have to vote twice,” he added. 

Pressure from the president

Gov. Landry’s move to postpone an election for a reason other than a natural disaster or health crisis is highly unusual, if not unprecedented, in Louisiana. 

The state has proceeded with U.S. House races after federal courts declared the voting districts unconstitutional in the past, most recently in 2022. Previously, officials agreed it was too close to the elections to change the map, and that new districts could wait until the following cycle two years later. 

But Landry and other Republican officials insist the Supreme Court decision from Wednesday is so sweeping in nature that it demands the aggressive action of calling off an election, even when absentee voting was already underway.

Trump is also putting pressure on GOP elected officials across the country to create as many Republican-leaning districts in Congress as possible before the end of the year to ensure the party maintains its advantage in the House.

The Supreme Court declared Louisiana’s current House map unconstitutional because it said state officials relied too heavily on the race of voters to draw its district boundaries. As a result, Landry and Republican legislators are expected to create a new map that would eliminate one, or both, of the state’s majority-Black districts. 

Calling off the current elections allows the governor and Republican state lawmakers to draw up new, more conservative U.S. House districts sooner.

A flurry of lawsuits have been filed in federal and state court attempting to stop the governor’s actions and keep Louisiana’s House races moving forward. So far, none have been successful, but more court decisions could be handed down in the next few days. 

In light of that uncertainty, U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican whose contentious reelection campaign is on the same ballot, was among those who chose to still pick a candidate in a House race when he went to early vote this week. 

Cassidy said he wasn’t convinced a court would uphold Landry’s decision to call off the election and wanted to vote just in case.

The senator said he agreed with the Supreme Court ruling on the U.S. House districts, but he was uncomfortable with the decision to cancel those races less than 48 hours before early voting began.

“The way that the election has transpired, that has almost treated the voter with disrespect,” Cassidy said in an interview with reporters. “That’s confusing to voters … We should be serving the voter, not politicians.”

Louisiana is not experiencing ordinary political turbulence. We are watching democratic instability unfold in real time.

Within a matter of days, voters across this state have been forced to absorb three major disruptions at once: the dismantling of Black voting representation through the ruling in Louisiana v. Callais; the suspension of congressional primary elections already in progress; and a statewide constitutional amendment that could fundamentally reshape public education in East Baton Rouge Parish and beyond.

The timing could not be more critical. Election Day is May 16. Early voting began Saturday. Absentee ballots have already been distributed. Yet Gov. Jeff Landry’s executive order suspended Louisiana’s closed party congressional primaries after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the state’s congressional map. 

Voters are now left in a vacuum of information, told that congressional races will still appear on their ballots, but that their votes in these contests won’t count.

That should alarm every person in this state, regardless of party affiliation.

A democracy cannot function when election rules shift after the machinery of voting has already begun moving. This creates confusion and distrust precisely when public confidence is most fragile. 

Black communities, in particular, understand the historical weight of sudden procedural changes in elections. Louisiana does not get to separate this moment from that history.

This erosion of collective representation is not limited to the ballot box. It is also manifesting in the very structure of our local institutions. 

On the May 16 ballot voters are being asked to decide on Constitutional Amendment 2, which would formally recognize the St. George Community School System with independent authority to receive state funding and raise local revenues though taxes.

When coupled with its implementing legislation, the amendment mandates the transfer of public school lands, facilities and assets from the East Baton Rouge Parish School System to the new St. George system by June 30, 2027. Reports indicate that East Baton Rouge schools could lose roughly $100 million if this separation proceeds.

This is bigger than one city, one amendment or one election cycle. This is about fragmentation: the fragmentation of voting rights, public education and, ultimately, public trust. The people most harmed by this fracturing are always the communities with the fewest resources to absorb the blow: Black families, working-class families, disabled residents and children already navigating underfunded schools.

Supporters of these measures frame them as issues of local control or administrative necessity. But language matters less than outcomes. When systems repeatedly reorganize power away from collective accountability and toward isolated control structures, inequity expands. History has shown us this repeatedly.

The most dangerous part is how normalized this chaos is becoming. Louisianans are being conditioned to accept government by disruption. Maps change overnight, elections pause midstream, public assets become bargaining chips. 

That is not healthy governance. That is democratic erosion dressed in procedural language.

The people of Louisiana deserve clarity before elections begin, not after. They deserve stable representation and public institutions designed to serve communities rather than divide them into competing islands of power. Because once citizens begin believing their vote is conditional, their schools are negotiable, and their representation is disposable, democracy itself begins to fracture.

And fractured systems rarely fail equally.