When the Mayor of Shreveport Couldn't Run for Mayor of Shreveport
Update: On Friday, The Louisiana Supreme Court reversed the lower courts' rulings and found Perkins cannot be disqualified from the election based on the error, writing, "Nothing is more fundamental and sacred to our system of democracy than the ability of citizens to choose their leaders."
Adrian Perkins was born in Shreveport, he lives in Shreveport, and he is the mayor of Shreveport. But as things stand, he’s not allowed to run for mayor again in November. He’s not term-limited—it’s a problem with his address. Yes, this is the tale of a genuine paperwork debacle, a labyrinth of documents and legalese where, in the end, Mayor Perkins’s carelessness may see him in the clutches of the Minotaur.
It all began with the “homestead exemption,” a feature of Louisiana tax law dating back to Huey Long and the Depression era that exempts a resident from paying taxes on the first $75,000 of the market value of a property they own and occupy. “When I came back to Shreveport, I had an apartment in Boston, and I couldn't afford to have a place here, so I lived with my mom,” Perkins says, “and that's my voting address that I've had since at least 2017.” He came down to Shreveport after graduating from Harvard Law School, a stint that followed West Point and deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Perkins was one of seven young Black mayors Esquire highlighted two years ago as they led cities amid three simultaneous generational crises—and talked things out on a group text thread. He got his own place downtown in 2019 after he was elected mayor the year before, and claimed a homestead exemption on the new residence.
That was where the trouble started, because Perkins did not change his voter registration to the new address. He stayed registered at his mom’s address on the other side of town and, just as he did in his successful 2018 campaign, he registered to run for mayor this year from that address. As a reminder, both of these addresses are in Shreveport. No one disputes that.
But a Shreveport resident named Francis Deal filed suit to challenge Perkins’s eligibility to run for mayor on the basis that Perkins attested in his Notice of Candidacy form that he was registered to vote at the same address where he claims a homestead tax exemption, when in fact he was still registered at his mom’s address. Deal called for Perkins to be disqualified from the race, which is a classic Louisiana “jungle primary” where candidates from all parties are thrown together in November. If no one cracks 50 percent, it will go to a top-two runoff.
Except right now, Perkins is no longer in the race. Both a trial court and Louisiana’s Second Circuit Court of Appeal sided with Deal, and Perkins will be out unless the state supreme court reverses the decision.
“It's not like I'm trying to hide anything. I'm on the record constantly talking about living downtown, and how we need to grow downtown. It ain't like I was like, 'Let me sneak and do this.' It was literally just an honest mistake,” he says. I suggested it’s unclear how he’s getting an advantage from declaring one Shreveport address over another. “No judge can articulate an advantage whatsoever,” he says. “They're just saying, 'Oh, it's improper.' There’s just no motive for me to do it at all.”
Perkins admits he messed up. He went to fill out his candidate qualifying forms at the clerk of court’s office, and when he arrived as the incumbent mayor, he says it was a bit of a media scrum. “There's news cameras everywhere, I'm doing interviews, I'm signing documents, the whole nine,” he says. “It ain't something where you can just sit down diligently and read through stuff.” It’s not the best excuse, and in court proceedings, Perkins has admitted that while his campaign team helped review the Notice of Candidacy beforehand, and while he consulted with his lawyer before signing it, he did not read it in full. He says he was also tripped up by the fact that the homestead exemption bit—Line 8—begins with language identical to the previous—Line 7—and he just missed it.
“I signed it, didn't think anything of it at all, and then that weekend I get a call from my attorney that's like, ‘Hey, I'm reading through this challenge of your residency right now.’" Perkins went and changed his voter registration to his downtown Shreveport address the day after Deal filed the challenge, but by then the candidate registration window had closed. After all, he’d waited until Friday, July 22—the last day of qualifying—to sign up.
“Why the hell did he wait so late to file his papers?” Ron Wilson says when I call him up about this. Wilson deals in civil rights and public interest litigation at Blake Jones Law Firm in New Orleans, and he’s watched the growing trend in Louisiana state politics of trying to get your opponent kicked off the ballot on a technicality before the race really begins. (There is already a case that’s been decided using the precedent of Perkins’ case.) “There are people who hang around the secretary of state's office on qualifying day, and they wait to see who's going to come in and qualify from the wrong district,” he said. “Years ago, these were few and far between. Nowadays, they say, look, if you can knock an opponent out of the race and save yourself $40 or $50,000 in campaign costs, I guess it's a reason or a motivating factor to do it.”
For his part, Perkins believes an opponent may be behind the suit, but it's ultimately his own carelessness that has opened up this opportunity for someone to screw him. In the appeals court’s view, the issue is cut-and-dried: “We find no legal error on the part of the trial court,” wrote Chief Judge D. Milton Moore III. “The outcome in this matter is governed by and falls squarely within this court’s holding in Sellar v. Nance.”
In that case, a man named Don Nance filed to run for mayor of West Monroe, Louisiana, from an address within the city limits where he was registered to vote. However, Nance also claimed a homestead exemption on a property outside the city limits. Michael Sellar, a qualified voter in West Monroe, challenged Nance’s candidacy. Sellar alleged Nance was not a “qualified elector” in West Monroe—and thus an illegitimate candidate. The Second Circuit Court of Appeal focused on the fact that Nance filed an inaccurate Notice of Candidacy, the same problem Perkins has, and disqualified him. That focus on paperwork has made Sellar a real problem for Perkins, too, even though (unlike with Nance) nobody is saying he lives anywhere but Shreveport.
“The fact that both of Perkins’s residences at issue are located within the City of Shreveport does not by itself warrant qualification for candidacy for the office of Mayor where the candidate made false certifications on his Notice of Candidacy,” the ruling says. And thus the mayor of Shreveport was disqualified from running for mayor.
"Courts rarely, if ever, knock out a candidate,” Wilson said. “The courts go to great lengths to validate candidacy.” Wilson cited the case of Jefferson Parish School Board member Simeon Dickerson, whose candidacy for re-election was challenged in part on the basis that he hadn’t filed state tax returns for each of the last five years, as required by Louisiana law. But at trial, the Fifth Circuit ruled testimony from his tax preparer that she’d mailed in the returns was enough to rebut the charges against Dickerson and keep him on the ballot.* The Louisiana Supreme Court, however, disagreed, and it ruled that he'd failed to provide adequate proof he'd filed his returns with the state. Usually, courts would prefer to let voters decide whether this kind of error is disqualifying, and that notion was central to the arguments Tuesday before the Louisiana Supreme Court.
The question now seems to hinge on whether Perkins’s false assertion on Line 8 invalidates the whole Notice of Candidacy, and thus his candidacy itself. Perkins’s attorney, Scott Bickford, argued that the legislature detailed penalties for inaccuracies on other lines, but left things ambiguous for Line 8, and when there’s ambiguity, courts must have a tie-goes-to-the-runner approach in favor of the candidate. Bickford said it’s the job of the legislature, not the courts, to make Perkins’s error disqualifying. The justices seemed sympathetic to the argument it should be left to the electorate and the legislature to adjudicate Perkins’s paperwork shortcomings, though they raised that they had a responsibility not to open these candidate forms up to abuse.
Deal’s lawyer, Jerry Harper, argued the opposite. But he also went so far as to declare that because of the address issue, Perkins was not qualified to vote in Shreveport. (The Louisiana Secretary of State’s website notes that, “If you have multiple residences and claim a homestead exemption, you must register to vote using your homestead exemption address.”) Because he was registered in the wrong precinct, he wasn’t really a “qualified elector,” so he couldn’t vote for mayor, much less run for it. “There are folks who remain as registered voters on voter rolls who are dead, who have been convicted of crimes since they registered, or have moved to foreign jurisdictions,” Harper told the seven-judge panel. “All of those people, like Mr. Perkins, remain on voter rolls.” In fact, Harper even argued at one point that, by the letter of the law, Perkins wasn’t a resident of Shreveport at all.
In most residency cases, the fight is over whether a candidate actually lives in the jurisdiction they want to represent. It’s a bit quaint in the era of potential U.S. Senators Dr. Oz and Herschel Walker, but it makes some sense to want your rep to be local. If they lie about living in town—especially on an affidavit under penalty of perjury—that’s bad. However, Adrian Perkins lives at an address that no one disputes is in Shreveport. He is a native son. This challenge, which suggests that, at the time he filed his form, he wasn’t qualified to vote for Shreveport mayor because he was registered in the wrong precinct—even though both precincts are in Shreveport—seems like a long stretch of the law just to keep a candidate off the ballot. If he’s no good, if his carelessness here is so damning, surely the people of Shreveport will just send him packing? At the moment, it doesn’t look like they’ll get the chance.
“A big thing about why I [ran for mayor], I wanted to encourage more young people like me to come back home, and come back to these deep red areas—to normalize it, and put some moderation in it,” Perkins says. “And this will be a cautionary tale, like, Don't do this. Stay where it's safe.” It’s also, he’d likely admit, a reminder to read carefully before you sign.
*Others have had different experiences. New Orleans juvenile court judge Yolanda King was indicted by the state attorney general’s office in 2014 on charges she’d made a false claim on an affidavit that she was domiciled in Orleans Parish. King was convicted in a one-day trial, though she was spared prison time and ultimately lodged a post-conviction appeal citing ineffective counsel. Former Louisiana State Rep. Cedric Richmond, who recently left a job as Director of the Office of Public Engagement at the White House, lost his law license for two months in 2008 over a residency dispute in a 2005 New Orleans city council race.
This article was updated after publication to indicate that Simeon Dickerson's qualification for candidacy was rejected on appeal.
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