Effort to recall Louisiana governor Jeff Landry fails

The effort to get Gov. Jeff Landry recalled from office has officially failed, the Louisiana Secretary of State’s office announced on Thursday. The lead organizer of recall effort said she did not turn in the required signatures before the Nov. 2 deadline 

Marian Gbaiwon, who oversaw the recall, said in a video posted to Facebook on Thursday night that she did not turn in any signatures to registrars of voters because they hadn’t met the number needed and did not want the signatures to become public record. 

“Why would we submit them and subject people unnecessarily to unnecessary scrutiny?” she said in the video. 

To recall a statewide elected official, a petition needs to get at least 20% of active registered voters statewide to hand-sign their names to a petition. When the petition to recall Landry was filed on May 4, Louisiana had just over 2.5 million voters, meaning around 500,000 people would have needed to sign their names to the petition in order to call an election. 

The effort to circulate the recall petition led by Gbaiwon and the organization Louisiana Deserves Better began to crumble over the summer when dozens of volunteers and collaborators left the effort amidst allegations of mismanagement. Volunteers said Gbaiwon failed to be transparent on how donations were spent and did not provide any accounting of the number of signatures collected.

Landry responded to the recall efforts’ failure on social media Thursday, saying the failure as well as Louisiana’s election of a Republican to the U.S. Senate stood out as a “bright spot” for conservatives amidst national losses to Democratic candidates in the midterm elections. 

“Despite widespread media coverage seemingly cheering on the recall effort, no registrar in any Louisiana parish has reported receiving signatures by the November 2 deadline,” he said in a post on X. “Our voters made clear they want conservative leadership, common-sense solutions, and greater opportunities.”

Signatures on a statewide recall petition are reported to the registrar of voters in each of the Louisiana parishes to be certified. Usually, certified reported signatures would then be sent to the Governor to issue a call for an election, but because the Governor was the subject of the recall petition, signatures from each parish would have been sent to the Secretary of State’s office. 

Another effort to recall Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill began around the same time efforts to recall Landry did. Officially filed with the Secretary of State’s office on May 13, the petition is still active, needing a similar 500,000 signatures to call an election. The deadline to collect these signatures is Monday. 

Murrill’s office did not respond to calls and text messages requesting comment on the recall. 

No statewide elected official in Louisiana has been recalled in the past sixty years. Some efforts to recall elected officials in towns and smaller municipalities have been successful in the past. In those cases, the number of signatures needed was far fewer than it would be for a statewide elected official.

In total, 76 recall elections have successfully removed an official from office in Louisiana since 1966, when the Secretary of State’s office began keeping records on recall elections. Most officials were mayors, school board members or city council members. 

Efforts in recent years to recall elected officials in areas with a larger voter base have failed to get the minimum required signatures, including attempts to oust former New Orleans’ mayor LaToya Cantrell. Only 27,243 of the over 67,000 signatures were found to be valid on the petition, the majority disqualified for reasons such as repeat signatures, profanity, fake names or mislabeled pages. 

Another 2017 attempt to remove Jefferson Parish President Mike Yenni from office came up short of the 90,000 signatures needed to require an election, despite Yenni admitting to sending “improper text messages to a young man” who was 17 years old at the time.

An effort in 2024 to remove St. Tammany’s coroner, Christopher Tape, after other elected officials in the parish expressed their concerns over Tape’s history of sexual abuse allegations failed to get the minimum number of signatures. 

Tape was accused of forcing himself on a girl who was under the age of 12 and indicted on six charges in August 2002. The case against Tape was dismissed in February 2003 after nine months of delay in his trial led the court to find a violation of his right to a speedy trial.