As the East Baton Rouge Parish Registrar of Voters office continues the process of verifying a new batch of 4,630 signatures submitted last week by organizers of the St. George incorporation effort, opponents of the movement are calling into question the validity of more than 200 signatures on the original petition submitted by the incorporation group last October.
Officials with Better Together, which is fighting the incorporation, released a report this morning claiming 239 signatures previously validated by the registrar’s office are potentially invalid—either because the signatories did not live in the proposed footprint of St. George at the time they signed the petition or were not registered to vote.
According to a statement from Better Together, an analysis of signatures on the original petition suggests 88 signatures are potentially invalid. That’s because 32 signatories did not register to vote until after the petition was submitted in October, while another 56 did not live in the proposed city at the time they signed the petition, Better Together says. The group is also questioning the validity of an additional 151 signatures because they do not appear on a list of registered voters that was requested by Better Together at the time the petition was submitted.
“This analysis shows that there are some major problems in the registrar’s validation process,” says M.E. Cormier, a leader with the Better Together campaign. “These are concrete, objective examples showing several different kinds of mistakes made by the registrar’s office in vetting the St. George petition.”
Aimee Pourciau, an assistant in the registrar’s office—which spent more than five months vetting the signatures on the original petition—says the office is unaware of the complaint and has no comment.
St. George spokesman Lionel Rainey is outraged.
“At some point you’ve got to let the Registrar of Voters do their job and stop interfering in the process,” Rainey says. “Better Together has done everything they possibly can to interfere in the electoral process and prevent this from getting on the ballot. At what point does this become interfering with an election?”
Better Together says it is calling on the registrar’s office to correct its mistakes in the validation process.
“Our entire community, on both sides of this issue, is depending on the registrar’s office getting this right,” Cormier says. “Fixing these problems in the vetting process and getting an accurate signature count might be the most important thing that office ever does.”
—Stephanie Riegel
