A recall targeting Elton Mayor Keisa Lemoine has failed.

Jeff Davis Parish Registrar of Voters Joann Blair said Tuesday the recall effort failed to receive the number of required signatures to make it valid and trigger a recall election.

“The petition failed because they did not acquire enough signatures for the petition to move forward for a recall election,” Blair said.

The recall effort needed to gather 275 signatures, which is equivalent to 40 percent of the 689 active registered voters in Elton at the time the recall started, according to the Louisiana Secretary of State’s Office.

Blair said she certified the 25-page petition on Friday after it was submitted last week by the recall committee. The petition was then mailed to the Governor’s Office.

Notifications were also sent to Lemoine and recall committee chairperson Brandilyn Nicole Soileau and co-chairman Brandon Wade Kelley. Soileau and Kelley were mayoral candidates in last November’s election.

Organizer Roderick Williams said the group is shocked and had sought clarification from the Secretary of State’s Office and Registrar of Voters on what was needed to make the petition valid, including clarification on witness signatures. Both officers were unable to offer any help, he said.

“This was our one shot and we missed,” Williams said. “The petition failed on a technicality and we can’t change that. All we can do is move on. It didn’t change the fact that there are election irregularities in Elton. Hopefully the mayor will use this as an opportunity to do what’s right.”

Lemoine, who did not return calls from the American Press, has never responded to the group’s allegations of election irregularities and voter fraud.

The organizers turned in the petition with 322 signatures. However, the Registrar of Voters Office could only could only verify 315 of the signatures as active voters in Elton but only one signature could be certified as meeting all the requirements of a recall petition including physical address, year of birth and the date they signed the petition.

There are a number of reasons signatures were not counted, Blair said.

Of the 315, one person who signed the petition passed away after signing it and is no longer considered an active voter, she said. Thirteen of the signatures were duplicates with people signing on different pages and 2 did not have active voter records.

“Of the 254 people who were residents within the town with acceptable signatures, not one of them were witnessed or dated,” Blair said. “When you collect signatures on a petition, the person collecting the signatures have to witness the voter’s signature and the date they collected the signature and it was not done on 254 signatures. The collector never witnessed the signatures at all so all those voters were rejected.”

The petition also included 45 people who were not registered to vote in Elton and 8 who were registered to vote outside the parish.

One of the signatures did not appear to match the signature on voter records on file.

Blair said he had two people requested to have names removed from the petition after it was filed, but only one person came to the office to sign a statement asking to be removed, but the petition had already been certified.

Organizers launched the recall effort in May after issues were raised for what they say are election irregularities and election fraud in the Nov. 8, 2022 mayoral election, including voters using addresses that did not exist and claiming homestead exemptions in other parishes.