A long line snaked out of the Iberia Parish Registrar of Voters office yesterday afternoon, curled around the rotunda and stretched as far as the art deco doors of the Iberia Parish Courthouse. Everybody was talking about how surprised they were that there was about a 45 minute wait, but nobody seemed to mind. “I brought my mother,” said one voter, who declined to give her name. “I might be busy on voting day, and I didn’t want to miss it. This vote is too important.”
That seems to be the attitude statewide, where early voting numbers exploded past records by over 50 percent. In the 2007 state-wide race for governor, 140,933 voters turned out early to cast their ballot. This morning, the Secretary of State’s Web site posts this year’s total early vote count at 266,880. Of the early votes cast state-wide 58 percent were by registered Democrats, 28 percent Republican and 13 percent other.
Lafayette Parish cast 9,194 votes, 4994 more than in 2007. Of those, according to Secretary of State Jay Dardenne’s office, 4709 were by Democrats, 3021 by Republicans and 1468 by those registered as other. The voting numbers were also broken down by race; whites cast 5736 votes, there were 3134 votes cast by blacks and 328 by those who listed themselves as other. Women out voted men by 489. In Iberia Parish, 5612 people voted over the seven day period that started on October 21.
In rendering his ruling, District Judge John Trahan all but called the real estate developer a liar for inconsistencies in his accounts of what prompted him to punch a school teacher unconscious.
Frank’s Casing Crew, now doing business as Frank’s International, will make its final appearance on ABiz’s list of the Top 50 Privately Held Companies in Acadiana this year, and once again, it will likely be at the top with more than $1 billion in annual revenues. The 75-year-old company specializing in tubular fabrication and installation services to the oil and gas industry plans to go public this year.
The defeat, or rather highjacking of House Bill 420 in the final days of this year's Legislative Session, say Reps. Vincent Pierre and Terry Landry, is the result of the propaganda spread by one unidentified local media outlet and an unnamed former state Representative, but nothing to do with the original legislation's lack of checks, balances or details.
City-Parish Council Chairman Brandon Shelvin heaped steady doses of condescending ire on a Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Louisiana executive while failing to reveal his financial ties to a BC/BS rival.
Abbeville native David Primeaux was a popular professor until his death late last year, and while he was successful at camouflaging a dark past, he couldn’t outlive it.
Tehmi Chassion’s failure to recuse himself in the school board’s selection of a group health benefits provider raises ‘serious questions’ on whether he violated state ethics law.
He’s a singer. A songwriter. A piano man. A family man. He’s even got his own Wikipedia entry. He’s David Egan. And he knows ancient secrets about the monolithic stones of Stonehenge that he’s not willing to share.
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