Elijah Lewis knocked on more than 700 doors across West Feliciana Parish this fall to win a school board seat representing District 7. Now he's not even sure he's legally registered to vote there, let alone serve there, after a mapping error tangled his registration with hundreds of his neighbors.
Lewis, a 75-year-old businessman, pastor and former Department of Corrections warden, entered the race at the suggestion of community members and qualified in August to run for the District 7 seat being vacated by longtime board member Sara Wilson-Rogers, who is stepping down after decades on the board. He went on to defeat two Republican competitors, Laura Bryan and Donna Gibbon, taking 53% of the vote, according to The Advocate. But Lewis remains on the ballot in District 7 even though he is now registered to vote in District 1, the paper reported in a separate account of the district mix-up.
A Registration Switch Discovered Days Before Early Voting
After qualifying in August, the West Feliciana Parish Registrar of Voters Office gave Lewis a list of voters in his district, and he began campaigning door to door under the assumption that his own registration matched the seat he was seeking. That assumption fell apart on Oct. 19, the day before early voting was scheduled to begin, when Lewis learned he could no longer vote in the district he was on the ballot to represent, per the same Advocate report.
The root of the problem traces back to 2022, when West Feliciana Parish underwent redistricting. The parish registrar's office failed to update electronic voter registration records to reflect the new district lines, and the resulting confusion left hundreds of residents assigned to districts where they no longer lived. West Feliciana Clerk of Court Stewart Hughes said his understanding was that the registrar had since corrected the affected records, while Deputy Secretary of State Trey Williams said local election officials must ensure voter registration records accurately reflect district boundaries, the article notes.
Error Touched About 10% of Registered Voters
The scope of the mix-up extends well beyond Lewis's own ballot. Officials said about 800 voters were assigned to the wrong districts or precincts, according to WBRZ. With West Feliciana Parish counting 7,872 registered voters, that means roughly 10% of the parish's electorate was affected by the error, WBRZ reported.
Political analyst James Hartman told WBRZ that a mistake of that size can matter enormously in a community this small, “an error of this size carries weight in small communities where elections can hinge on razor-thin margins.” In a parish where a single school board race can turn on a handful of votes, an error touching 800 registrations is not a small footnote.
Could Anyone Still Challenge the Win?
Louisiana law requires school board members to live in the districts they represent, and state statute specifies that a candidate must have been actually domiciled for the preceding year in the parish, ward or district from which they seek election, according to the Louisiana State Legislature. A residency challenge filed during qualifying could have removed Lewis from the District 7 ballot altogether, but that window has passed — residency challenges to elected officials are typically filed during the race, within seven days after the qualifying period, under an election code that sets that same seven-day window for eligibility challenges. A hearing on such a challenge occurs within 72 hours, with any ruling eligible for appeal to the court of appeal.
Louisiana Election Attorney Alesia Ardoin said it remains unclear whether a complaint against Lewis would succeed at this stage, and she described workarounds to the election code as a slippery slope. A district 7 or district 1 resident could still attempt to challenge Lewis's eligibility, but doing so would require filing a written complaint with the district attorney's office. West Feliciana District Attorney Bruce Dodd said he knew of no complaints and had not been contacted about the matter since before the election. The Louisiana Secretary of State's office notes that a registered voter who believes a candidate illegally qualified may present evidence to the district attorney, per its election FAQ guidance.
Precedent From Jefferson Parish
Louisiana has seen qualification fights play out before an election too. In Jefferson Parish, a sitting school board member filed a lawsuit to challenge an opponent's ballot qualifications, alleging the candidate, Phillip Huskey, had listed an address in the 1st District on his election qualifying form, according to NOLA.com. That case was reported as scheduled for trial, illustrating how residency disputes typically get resolved before voters ever cast a ballot — not after.
For now, the West Feliciana school board election results stand. Attorneys note that a candidate's unchallenged candidacy remains valid even if the candidate does not meet all requirements, leaving Lewis's seat intact unless someone formally steps forward. Lewis, for his part, said the registration mix-up left him disappointed in the process, and he drew a personal comparison to his own family's history, likening his experience to his grandfather's and father's denied voter registration attempts in the 1950s and 1960s.
