A crowded field of five Republicans running for a little-watched but consequential court seat in East Baton Rouge Parish has been narrowed to two. Toni Higginbotham, a retired appellate judge, and Jen Racca, a Metro Council member and attorney, are headed to a Dec. 12 runoff for the District 6 justice of the peace seat after Tuesday's primary.
How the Vote Broke Down
With all precincts reporting, Higginbotham took 37% of the vote and Racca finished second with 29%, according to The Advocate. Dajuana LeDuff W. Moore drew 18% of the vote, Robert Ainsworth collected 14%, and Christoph Bajewski rounded out the field with 2%. Because none of the five candidates cleared a majority, the top two finishers now advance to next month's runoff.
District 6 covers a southeastern swath of East Baton Rouge Parish running from Spanish Town to the parish's southern boundary, including eastern St. George, per the Advocate's reporting. All five candidates who ran in the primary are Republicans, the paper noted, meaning the runoff will be decided within the same party.
What a Justice of the Peace Actually Does
Louisiana's justices of the peace are a lesser-known layer of the court system, but their dockets carry real weight for everyday residents. The courts typically handle small property claims and also approve eviction orders, and East Baton Rouge Parish alone has six of these justice of the peace courts, each covering its own district, according to a separate Advocate report on the candidates' backgrounds. Most of the pay and operating costs for each office come from fees charged for the court's services rather than from a standard government budget line.
That fee-based structure has drawn broader scrutiny elsewhere in the state. An investigation by The Guardian found that the eviction filing rate within the jurisdiction of Louisiana's busiest justice of the peace court ran nearly three times the national average. Reporting from Verite News, examining the same court system more broadly, found that five Louisiana justices of the peace earned more than $220,000 in a single year from filing fees, much of it tied to eviction cases, and cited a Princeton University Eviction Lab finding that roughly one in 13 renter households faced eviction filings in 2025 nationally.
Those statewide figures describe the justice of the peace system generally rather than District 6 specifically, but they underscore why the office matters locally. A separate local radio report from Talk 107.3 FM put District 6's own caseload at more than 3,500 evictions a year, with the workload expected to keep climbing.
The Candidates' Backgrounds
Higginbotham, 80, brings decades of judicial experience to the race. She served as a family court judge for 14 years beginning in 1996, was later elected to the First Circuit Court of Appeal, and spent 10 years there before aging off the bench in 2020, the Advocate reported. Since retiring, she has worked as a fill-in judge for recused or unavailable judges across Louisiana. Higginbotham has said the only thing her opponents can use against her is her age.
Racca, an attorney with a varied legal background, has served seven years on the Metro Council and chose to run for the justice of the peace seat instead of seeking a third council term. She has said her legal experience and years of direct conversations with voters on the council trained her to explain complicated concepts in plain English, according to the Advocate's reporting.
Racca's Pitch on Caseload and Resources
Racca has said she believes she can adjust the justice of the peace position to serve residents more efficiently. Her stated priorities include making practical changes to how the district's heavy caseload moves through the system and properly connecting people who are losing their homes through eviction with resources already available through the city-parish, the Advocate reported.
The runoff lands amid wider attention on how Louisiana's justice of the peace courts operate, including a federal lawsuit filed in March against an East Baton Rouge Parish justice of the peace, Steven Sanders, whose caseload generated nearly $2.7 million in court-fee revenue between 2019 and 2023 and who organizations suing him say handles 300 to 400 evictions a month, according to the Louisiana Illuminator. Sanders is not a candidate in the District 6 race, and the dossier does not tie those figures to either Higginbotham or Racca. Voters in District 6 will decide between the two remaining candidates on Dec. 12.
