CURTAILING ELECTION FRAUD IN LOUISIANA!

Monday, September 8th, 2025

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

CURTAILING ELECTION FRAUD IN LOUISIANA!

 Paper ballots and limited absentee balloting in our election?  That’s what the president is calling for. Does he have a point? The overwhelming majority of democratic countries require paper ballots in their elections. According to the Pew Research Center, paper ballot are used in 209 of the 227 countries that re democratic.. For example, the Associated Press reports that voters in France “use the same system that’s been used for generations: paper ballots that are cast in person and counted by hand.” And if there is no paper trail, you can see why voters can be suspicious. If we want to have the gold standard for voter security, then paper ballots are the key.

I served for eight years as Secretary Of State and the state chief elections officer back in the 1980s. Under my watch, Louisiana used large and bulky voting machines that had no electronic connections and gave a full paper display of the vote. The machines were opened after being removed back to a warehouse where any citizen could watch a review and final account. No one questioned the process.

And what happened to election day? It’s gone by the wayside. It used to be everyone voted on one day with military exceptions, and those who signed a notarized affidavit that they would not be present on election day. Now we have voting spread out over a month and absentee voting mailed to anyone who asks.  It’s become “too inconvenient” to drive a few blocks to a polling location.  The US is almost alone in not combining the voting process to one day.  So we now have election month.

Elections back in my day generally took place without a hitch.  Mail ballots were allowed only for servicemen serving outside the country, and for a limited number of essential public workers. When I first took office in 1980, there was so much public confidence in the elections process that the clerks of court shut down their offices when the polls closed. The only way the news media could report the election results was by having a stringer reporter hang out at the clerk’s office and write down the results as the court workers hand-delivered the ballot totals.  I changed this procedure by meeting with the clerks, and getting their commitment that they would call me in Baton Rouge at the Secretary Of State’s office to report the voting totals by telephone.

Absentee voting? You couldn’t do it unless you signed an affidavit swearing that you would be out of the state on election day.  I was voting at my home in Ferriday back then.  But I had to be in my Baton Rouge office to oversee the election process. How was I to legally vote? I got up at 3 o’clock in the morning, drove two hours to Ferriday, stopped at Hubert Lee’s donut shop to pick up a box of hot donuts for the commissioners, and arrived at ward one, precinct 1, held in the Flemings flying service hanger at 6:00 AM when the polls opened. After a brief visit with the commissioners, all who I knew well on a first name basis, I voted, then quickly headed back to Baton Rouge so as to be back in my office shortly after 8:00 AM. A real labor of love to cast my ballot which I did for a number of years.

Life seemed so much simpler then. My how our country is changed.  Unfortunately, manipulation of voting machines, widespread voter fraud, crooked elections officials, and foreign hacking have all become a rallying point for those who see conspiracies as our current election cycles roll around.

Personally, it’s hard for me to buy in to such schemes of election manipulation.  But we’re living in a different world today where claims of crooked elections have become a way for candidates to raise campaign money. And like it or not, allegations of voting fraud will be a part of numerous elections across the country in coming elections. So we better get used to it.

Peace and Justice

Jim Brown

Jim Brown’s syndicated column appears each week in numerous newspapers throughout the nation and on websites worldwide.  You can read all his past columns and see continuing updates at http://www.jimbrownla.com. You can also look over a list of books he has published at www.thelisburnpress.com.