Chapter 4
the result of the election by changing the vote totals, or at least made the election result impossible to determine.
Based on this record, no more than two votes would be subtracted, a difference that would be insufficient to change the election result or make it impossible to determine.
At 357 (emphasis supplied).77
Nor was the court of appeal sympathetic to Mr. Nugent’s arguments that three votes should be added
to his total to represent the votes of his three campaigners who were in jail during the election. Their arrests, the court of appeal said, flowed from the grand jury indictments, not from an order of the district
attorney.
Furthermore, the trial court’s remarks at the end of the trial indicate that the judge simply did
not believe that the plaintiff had met its burden of proving a scheme by the District Attorney that
would have included the district judge and the grand jury.
At 359. This view was repeated by the court of appeal when it rejected Mr. Nugent’s argument that the
district attorney abused his power by having Mr. Nugent subpoenaed to be before the grand jury during
the week before the election.
But after the court of appeal decided that Mr. Nugent had lost his lawsuit, as well as the election, it had
some pointed criticism of the way in which the election and the trial were conducted.
Although we ultimately conclude that there is no manifest error in the trial court’s finding that
plaintiff failed to carry his burden of proof to annul the election, this does not mean we find no
evidence suggesting irregularities and/or fraud in this election…[T]here are other remedies for election
offenses.
At 359 (internal citation omitted) (emphasis supplied).
How does this case compare with the situation in Jernigan where the court declared that fraudulent ballots
are illegal and that “a vote that is illegally cast cannot be counted?” At 689 (emphasis supplied). The
fraud in both Jernigan and Nugent was vote buying. But, in Nugent, the court concluded that the evidence
showed the vote buying was isolated to seven instances, only two of which the court felt actually were sold
votes—where the voters cast their ballots for a candidate because of the payment—and that the other five
people cast their ballots as they would have in any event. That situation was seen by the court as resulting
in two, not seven, fraudulent ballots.
Accordingly, the court in Nugent would agree with the court in Jernigan that fraudulent ballots should not
be counted—the two ballots that the Nugent court concluded were “bought” were discounted—but the
court in Nugent would say that the situation in Nugent was distinguishable from the situation in Jernigan:
without a plot by the district attorney to use the grand jury to disrupt the police chief ’s campaign, Nugent
did not have a situation comparable to the “flagrant, extensive, and corrupt violations” in Jernigan, where
the vote buying appeared to pervade an entire precinct, to change the vote in the precinct and to “destroy
the fairness and equality of the election.” Note, too, the distinction in Nugent between the treatment accorded the ballots and the treatment accorded the vote buyers. A crime occurred, and even if it was not so
pervasive as to require that the election results be thrown out or that the election be rerun, we all can agree
77
As was noted in the analysis of Moreau v. Tonry, 339 So.2d 3 (La. 1976), in Chapter 2, a Louisiana statute said that an election may be upset only if the one contesting the election can show that “but for irregularities or fraud he would have been nominated…”. At 4 (emphasis
added). Alternatively, the statute allowed proof that the voters had been deprived of their free will by fraud or serious irregularities. This
is the standard that preexisted Nugent and is addressed in the court’s opinion in Nugent.
91