Louisiana

Act 1 of 2024 moved Congress, the Supreme Court, PSC and BESE into closed party primaries effective this year. Then SCOTUS decided Louisiana v. Callais on April 29 — Louisiana was the case — the governor pulled the U.S. House races from the May 16 ballot, and Act 7 reverted them to the jungle system for this cycle only. Votes already cast in those House races were voided and never released. A crawler holding either the old model or the clean new one is wrong, and a candidate list captured in spring does not describe November.

The party primary, its runoff, and the December general all fall on Saturdays; only the November federal general sits on the usual Tuesday. And the hours differ by day: Saturday elections run 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., Tuesday elections 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. A scheduler that derives either the weekday or the hours from a national default is wrong on most of Louisiana's calendar.

The elected clerk of court is chief election officer of the parish and runs election day; the registrar of voters is appointed by the parish governing authority and owns registration and early voting; a parish board of election supervisors counts absentee and early ballots; and the Secretary of State is chief election officer of the state. No one is elected to administer elections as such. Meanwhile title to every voting machine vests in the state, so there is no per-parish equipment table to build — it is one state row, currently mid-procurement.

Under the majority system a candidate who draws no opponent is declared elected and their name is not printed. A winner can therefore hold office with no ballot line and no vote total at all — three Supreme Court justices this cycle. And a candidate who takes a majority in the first round is elected outright, so the 'general' for that office simply does not occur. A model that expects every officeholder to have a vote count, or every office to appear at the general, is wrong in both directions.

Louisiana's word for the final act is promulgation, and it runs on a statutory ladder: the parish board files its compiled statement with the clerk by 4 p.m. on the fifth day, mails a copy to the Secretary of State by noon on the sixth, tentative results post by noon on the seventh, and the returns are promulgated by publication in the state's official journal on the fourteenth. A pipeline matching on the word 'certify' misses the event entirely.

There are no counties. Thirty-eight parishes are governed by a police jury whose members are jurors and whose head is chosen from among them — so those parishes have no separately elected executive at all — while others use a council with an elected parish president, four are consolidated city-parishes, and one is council-manager. A title-based classifier misfiles the legislature and invents an executive that does not exist.

Governor, every statewide office, both legislative chambers and the parish row offices all elected in 2023 and elect again in 2027. So a midterm crawler finds no state executive and no legislature here. What 2026 does carry: the federal races, district attorneys and district judges on their even-year congressional clock, school boards, the closed-primary offices, and municipal elections on their own charter dates.

Anything short of a majority on November 3 goes to a runoff on Saturday, December 12 — including every U.S. House district under the reverted system. That same December ballot also opens a new contest: the special primary for the 14th Senate district, whose own general falls in January 2027. A runoff date carrying another race's first round breaks any model that treats December as the end of the cycle.