The following has been provided by the Louisiana Highway Safety Commission:

Fireworks shows are a hallmark of Independence Day. But flashing police lights are the only show for impaired drivers as the Louisiana Highway Safety Commission begins its statewide Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over campaign.

According to AAA, a record 60.6 million people will travel by car this 4th of July. Law enforcement officers across Louisiana will be looking specifically for impaired drivers this holiday weekend, and those who fail a sobriety test will be arrested, LHSC Executive Director Lisa Freeman said.

“This is a Louisiana campaign to keep Louisiana citizens safe from the scourge of impaired driving,” Freeman said. “People should be able to celebrate without worrying about getting hit by a drunk driver.”

LHSC has made funds available to Louisiana law enforcement agencies to schedule extra troopers, officers, and deputies to patrol the roads and interstates through Sunday, July 7. These law enforcement officers have been trained to spot behaviors that indicate a driver is impaired.

“If a driver has a blood-alcohol concentration of .08 or higher, that driver is legally impaired and subject to arrest,” Freeman said. “Actual impairment can begin with just one alcoholic beverage. Bottom line: If you’re drinking, you shouldn’t be driving.”

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, just a small amount of alcohol can cause a decline in visual functions, an inability to perform two simultaneous tasks, reduced coordination, an inability to steer, and a reduced response to emergency driving situations.

Motor vehicle crashes involving drivers who have been drinking kill and injure hundreds of people every year in Louisiana. The statistics are generally worse during holiday periods. From 2018-2022, 12 people were killed and 254 people were injured in alcohol-related crashes during the Independence Day holiday period, according to the Center for Analytics and Research in Transportation Safety at LSU.

“We’ve made so much progress in making roads safer and making vehicles safer, but we continue to see these tragedies,” Freeman said. “Unfortunately, you can never make a road or a car safe enough for an impaired driver. Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over is an important tool for us to protect all road users.”

Besides refusing to drive impaired, avoiding distractions behind the wheel such as a cell phone, driving the speed limit, and wearing a seatbelt greatly reduce the risk of being injured or killed in a motor vehicle crash.

Copyright 2024 Louisiana Highway Safety Commission. All rights reserved.

Here in Louisiana, we passed a slate of 11 different election integrity bills during our 2024 legislative session. Each bill was designed to earn voters’ trust via three main goals: to help close loopholes in our existing election integrity policies, to establish uniformity in the collection and tabulation of ballots, and to help further clean our voter rolls. 

Cleaning Up the Voter Rolls

Act 2 will allow the registrar of voters to conduct an expanded annual canvass of Louisiana voters. Federal law requires that every state conduct voter list maintenance. To that end, every year, election officials send out cards to voters who file a change of address with the U.S. Postal Service, which they sign and return. This process keeps our rolls clean and up-to-date. If someone has moved out of state or passed away, we need to know about it, and they need to be removed from the voter rolls. Act 2 will allow us to send canvass cards to those who have not voted or had contact with our office in 10 or more years, a group numbering over 160,000, according to our records. If they do not respond, they will be moved to the inactive list. 

This law was a recommendation of the Louisiana legislative auditor and was previously passed by the legislature three years in a row. Our previous governor vetoed the bill all three times. But now we finally have a governor who understands the importance of election integrity measures.

Requiring Proof of Citizenship to Register to Vote

An overwhelming majority of voters approved a constitutional amendment in 2022 that banned alien voting in Louisiana. Act 500 allows us to enforce this amendment by requiring proof of U.S. citizenship when individuals register to vote. It should not be up for debate that the right to vote is reserved for American citizens.

Making Absentee Voting More Secure

The several absentee ballot collection and tabulation reform bills passed include Act 380, Act 302, Act 317, Act 712, Act 321, and Act 25. The bills complement Louisiana’s ban on ballot harvesting by preventing individuals from engaging in absentee ballot application harvesting, assisting with the certification of more than one absentee ballot aside from immediate family members, or delivering more than one absentee ballot of a non-family member to registrars of voters by any means, among other protections. Further, these acts will require those witnessing a ballot to be at least 18 years old.

Act 321 provides for uniform absentee ballot standards across Louisiana. Currently, the Parish Boards of Election Supervisors in each parish determines when to reject a ballot based on deficiencies. But the new legislation will clarify when, in the event of certain deficiencies, a ballot must be challenged. This includes mail-in ballots with any “missing information” that is “required” and not properly corrected. 

Closing Loopholes and Preventing Fraud

Act 264, Act 701, and Act 291 are preventative measures that will help further close loopholes in our election policies and provide additional tools with which to investigate instances of voter fraud. 

Act 291 preemptively bans ranked-choice voting (RCV) in Louisiana by prohibiting its use “in determining the election or nomination of any candidate to any local, state, or federal elective office” in the state. RCV is a convoluted, confusing system that has caused chaos in elections across the country, and this ban will work to protect the principle of one person, one vote. 

Act 701 will require third-party groups that wish to hold voter registration drives — defined as “the solicitation, distribution, or collection of voter registration applications by a third-party voter registration organization” — to register with our office. It would protect voters’ personal information and enforce the timeliness of the registration forms’ return, to help avoid a situation where people who think they have been registered to vote show up on Election Day and find their registration form was never returned. It would also prohibit these third-party groups from pre-filling applications, which could lead to voter confusion. 

Act 264 established the Division of Election Integrity within the Louisiana Department of State. The law gives Louisiana’s Elections Compliance Unit — which has successfully investigated cases of election fraud — a new name that more clearly describes the division’s work.

An Example to Other States 

All 11 bills in our legislative package were passed during the regular legislative session and have already been signed into law by Gov. Jeff Landry. 

Measures such as these reinforce trust in the electoral process. They grant a level of certainty to voters that their votes count and that their elections are fair, regardless of outcome. If other states seek to accomplish the same, they should consider following Louisiana’s example. 

Nancy Landry is Louisiana’s 45th Secretary of State. She was elected in November 2023 and previously served as First Assistant Secretary of State.