From the editor: The second-darndest election ever

The election was agonizingly close. The margin was thin enough to disappear in dim light. The outcome was in doubt for weeks.
That election had chads, the little cardboard squares that get punched out of punch-card ballots.
There were hanging chads, dimpled chads, pregnant chads. They all landed with a thud in court.
If you’re a political junkie, or even just an informed citizen of a certain age, you may think we’re talking about Bush v. Gore in 2000. But all those things can be said about another election that happened just up the road.
You could argue that because St. Mary has now been attached to what used to be the 7th Congressional District to make the new 3rd District, the 1996 7th District election has been grafted onto our political heritage.
How close was that election?
Congressional districts back then had more than 600,000 people. About 177,000 of them cast votes in the primary.
The second spot in the 1996 runoff was decided by eight votes.
That’s 0.0045 percent of the votes cast.
The story of that election is also compelling because it gave a hint of what was to come in Florida in 2000. And the story was full of interesting people who were acting nobly.
In 1996, U.S. Rep. Jimmy Hayes of Lafayette was giving up his House seat to run for the Senate seat left vacant when J. Bennett Johnston stepped down. The leading contender for the open 7th District House seat was Democrat Chris John of Crowley.
The other notable Democrats were Lake Charles attorney Hunter Lundy and Tyron Picard, son of the late former state superintendent of education, Cecil Picard.
Heading the list of Republicans was David Thibodaux, a UL professor who had tried to unseat Hayes in two previous elections.
Thibodaux was a combination movement conservative and social conservative who had run for Congress twice before.
And, speaking of foreshadowing, Thibodaux had written a book warning of the dangers of political correctness on college campuses, long before anyone heard of trigger warnings and microaggressions.
Unlike some true believers, Thibodaux was a happy warrior. He was famous among the local press for his post-story phone calls — not to complain, but to discuss. He was later elected to the Lafayette Parish School Board and pushed relentlessly for smaller class sizes.
Thibodaux wasn’t alone among Republicans on the 1996 congressional ballot. Three lesser-known members of the local GOP also qualified, raising concern that the Republican vote would be divided. And that appeared to be the case in the open primary on Sept. 21, 1996.
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John was first with 26 percent of the vote, followed by Lundy and Thibodaux with 22 percent each.
But Lundy had eight more votes than Thibodaux, meaning Lundy would go on to the runoff against John.
After the obligatory recount, Thibodaux decided to challenge the results in state district court in Lafayette.
That sort of challenge really is a challenge. Louisiana election law makes it difficult to overturn an election result.
It’s not enough to prove that monkey business took place. You have to prove that the monkey business changed the outcome of the election.
But Thibodaux put together a strong team for the challenge. The team was led by Ben Bagert, the New Orleans attorney who was famous for bowing out of the 1990 Senate primary. Ex-Klansman David Duke was challenging incumbent Johnston that year, and Bagert didn’t want to split the anti-Duke vote.
Also on the team was Beth Rickey, a Lafayette Republican who had done much of the research that tied Duke to white supremacists.
The judge was Don Aaron of Crowley, who was one of the most respected jurists in the 15th Judicial District. Aaron had a knack for hard-headed practicality coupled with a respect for the intellectual side of the law.
At one point, after a series of decisions went against Thibodaux, Bagert rejected the opportunity to criticize Aaron for reporters. Bagert said Aaron’s rulings had been “not just fair, but wise.”
During the court proceeding, Thibodaux’s suspicion fell on Evangeline Parish, which still used the sort of punch-card ballots that would be the center of so much turmoil four years later in Florida. Evangeline election officials were called to the stand to explain how they classified votes in which the voter’s stylus didn’t exert enough pressure to make a clean punch that could be counted by machine.
I covered that proceeding, and it seemed at the time that the Evangeline elected officials relied on gut feelings more than any objective guidelines.
Maybe Judge Aaron agreed. He had boxes of disputed ballots taken to a room near the courtroom, and everybody — the parties to the challenge, the lawyers, everybody except reporters — started counting.
When the cloud of chads cleared, the result actually changed. The courtroom count increased Lundy’s margin to 12 votes.
That’s the result you’ll find on the Louisiana secretary of state’s website today: 38,605 votes for Lundy, and 38,593 for Thibodaux.
So two Democrats, John and Lundy, made the Nov. 5, 1996, runoff, a reminder of how much Louisiana has changed politically in 20 years.
John beat Lundy in the runoff, 53 percent to 47 percent, and served four terms as a moderate “Blue Dog” Democrat before running unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate against David Vitter in 2004. John is now the president and spokesman of the Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association.
Aaron retired from the bench recently. Bagert and Lundy continue to practice law. Lundy wrote a 1999 book, “Let Us Prey: The Public Trial of Jimmy Swaggart,” about the courtroom fight between the TV evangelist and Marvin Gorman.
Rickey died in 2009 in a New Mexico hotel room. She had contracted a viral disease during a mission trip to Mexico. She also suffered from an immune disorder and Crohn’s disease. She was 53.
When John left the 7th Congressional District seat open in 2004, Thibodaux ran for Congress again. But he was beaten by the present incumbent, Charles Boustany of Lafayette, who is running for the Senate this year.
Thibodaux was killed in a motorcycle crash in 2007. He was 54. The Lafayette Parish School Board named its new science, technology, engineering and math academy after him.
There’s lots of talk about rigged elections and election challenges in the 2016 presidential race. If that turns out to be the case, the 1996 7th District primary shows us that we’re in for a series of long, tough battles in the courtroom.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review. Reach him at bdecker@daily-review.com.