Absentee Voting At All Time High In La. Presidential Primary

LA. PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY– Despite months of delays the Presidential Primary election in Louisiana is finally underway. It’s been a bumpy road for the primary facing concerns around racial inequality and the novel coronavirus pandemic. Voting by mail has been a hot and somewhat controversial topic as there’s been more demand than ever for mail-in voting to help avoid infection by the Coronavirus. Republicans have been recalcitrant to extend mail-in voting saying doing so encourages voter fraud although Republican Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin has gone on record saying such instances are very rare. In-person early voting is normally a week at this time but was expanded to two weeks for the July primary.

Voters were showing up to vote in significant numbers and absentee ballots are still being accepted. According to Louisiana’s Secretary of State : more than 196,000 people have voted in Louisiana’s Presidential Primary before Election Day. Of those –more than 103,000 were in-person votes, that's already about 30,000 greater than it was for the 2016 presidential race. But the real story is mail-in voting. John Couvillion is the founder of JMC Analytics a group that monitors elections and voting habits.

"For the mail-in voting, it's up to 83,000, which not only is four times the volume of the 2016 presidential primary," Couvillion said. "But that 83,000 is an all-time record in terms of the number of people who voted by mail breaking a record set by the 2016 presidential race of about 60,000."




https://www.redriverradio.org/post/absentee-voting-all-time-high-la-presidential-primary-0