Louisiana ethics board raises questions about judges’ campaign transparency

Three judges requested that their home addresses and those of their spouses be removed from their campaign finance reports. (Getty Images)

Three elected judges in Louisiana are taking advantage of a new privacy law to remove their spouses’ home and business addresses from the state’s public campaign finance database, which tracks political donations and spending.

The Louisiana Board of Ethics wants to know to what extent it must comply with these requests. In June, he asked Attorney General Liz Murrill for a legal opinion clarifying the requirements he must meet, but Murrill’s office has not yet released its response.

Judges can require a large amount of personal information be removed from government and private websites under a law which came into force in February. The statute conflicts with longstanding laws intended to ensure transparency in government and elections, which the ethics committee traditionally follows.

The Ethics Committee will likely receive many more than three deletion requests in 2026. Starting in February, hundreds of additional elected officials will also be able to request that their personal information, as well as that of their family members, be removed from campaign finance and personal disclosure databases.

Louisiana legislators voted earlier this year to expand the list of people authorized to keep their personal information private to include state legislators, state elected officials, civil service commissioners, district attorneys, assistant district attorneys, and district attorney investigators.

The privilege will also be extended to people who live with them, such as spouses, children and other dependents.

The privacy law was intended to protect public officials and their families from harassment and violence. But proponents of open government have warned that it will make it easier for officials to hide their conflicts of interest.

“[The law] “It’s well-intentioned but really problematic,” said David Cuillier, director of the Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida. “All this will do is make corrupt politicians hide from the public.”

Three judges, 66 reports

All active and retired judges – those city, state and federal – have the opportunity to ask the Ethics Committee to remove their personal information from its website and campaign finance database. But so far, only three have done so, according to documents received through a public records request.

The three judges presiding over Jefferson Parish Juvenile Court: Barron Burmaster, Amanda Calogero and Jennifer Womble. They sent letters in May demanding that their home and business addresses be removed from the ethics committee’s website.

“This law was proposed because there has been a national increase in violence against members of the judiciary and was passed to help protect members of Louisiana’s judiciary and their family members,” said Dawn Palermo, court administrator for Jefferson Parish Juvenile Court, who spoke on behalf of the judges.

In total, the three justices’ requests would require the ethics committee to amend 66 separate reports and the campaign finance database hosted on its website. These included redactions of forms that judges submitted years ago before taking office.

Burmaster requested that his and his wife’s home address be removed from personal financial disclosure records he filed as a member of the Lafitte Area Levee Independent District from 2008 to 2013, before becoming a judge.

Calogero requested that her address be removed from old travel declaration forms for out-of-state conferences she attended while working as Jefferson Parish prosecutor from 2012 to 2018.

All three justices requested that the addresses be removed from the section of campaign finance documents that details personal loans received by their campaigns.

Burmaster requested that the business address of Barataria Dental, which provided a $5,000 loan to his 2013 campaign, be removed because it is his wife’s dental office.

Calogero requested that her campaign committee chair’s business address be removed from several campaign finance reports because he is also her husband.

In response to these requests, the Ethics Committee removed spouses’ home addresses and business addresses from judges’ personal disclosure forms and campaign organizational materials that appear on its website.

But the board is waiting to amend campaign finance reports that provide details about donors and loans until Murrill provides more specifics, Ethics Administrator David Bordelon said.

When enough is enough

One of the questions the ethics committee is asking Murrill is whether the new law requires him to remove a home or business address entirely or whether the board can maintain the list of available cities and states.

Addresses are often used to verify the identity of a campaign contributor or vendor.

For example, the address of a campaign contributor named Mike Johnson would help determine whether a campaign donation came from Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Mike Johnson of Benton, Speaker pro tempore of the Louisiana House of Representatives, Mike Johnson of Pineville, or a private citizen with the same name.

It is likely that this issue will become much more urgent for the ethics committee next year. Active judges are prohibited from contributing to a political campaign. It is less likely that their addresses will need to be removed from campaign finance reports other than their own.

But the elected officials who will be entitled to have their personal information redacted in 2026 are among the state’s most prolific political donors. State officials, legislators and their families regularly make contributions to each other.

If even a fraction of them requested that their address be removed from all reports, the number of documents that would need to be changed could easily reach into the thousands.

Internet versus IRL

The ethics committee also asked the attorney general to clarify whether deletion requests apply only to materials shared on the Internet. It is unclear whether a person can make a public records request for a form that has been redacted online and receive an unredacted paper copy of the same document.

THE new privacy law allows public officials to block the publication of their personal information, but also defines the term “publish” narrowly as “publicly publishing or displaying on the Internet.”

“You can still go to these entities and get these pieces of paper. … You’re not specifically prohibiting someone from getting the information,” Judge Tiffany Chase of Louisiana’s Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals told lawmakers while defending the 2024 bill.

“It’s just that it can’t be available on the Internet,” she said.

The purpose of the law was not to withhold information from the public, according to Chase. It was a question of giving a period of “reflection” to a person likely to be angry with a judge or an elected official so that they can calm down before having access to the personal address of the official, she explained.

However, the law has already been used at least once to block access to a judge’s files both online and in person. Louisiana Supreme Court Justice Will Crain used status to justify sealing your divorce petition for 11 months. The public could not access it electronically or in hard copies at that time.

While the ethics committee primarily deals with home and business addresses, the new law allows judges — and soon many other elected officials — to require the removal of a much broader set of information from social media and websites.

Under the law, officials can also request over the Internet to remove their license plate numbers, vehicle identification numbers, marriage records, dates of birth, a child’s school or daycare, and places of worship, among other items.

These removal requests may be made to governments, businesses, and individuals, including those who share a post on social media or use the information in a news story.

Penalties for non-compliance are severe. The law allows judges – and soon hundreds of other elected officials – to sue public agencies and individuals for damages for refusing to delete their protected information.

Violation of the law could also result in criminal misdemeanor charges punishable by up to 90 days in jail or a $1,000 fine.

That could be part of the reason the ethics committee might ask state lawmakers for a waiver of the law, Bordelon said. If granted, there would be no need to remove public information from its website.

Lawmakers have already provided such an exception for the secretary of state’s office. This agency oversees candidate qualification forms, voter registration information, and business ownership documents.

Secretary of State Nancy Landry, R-Lafayette, said her agency would not have enough staff to respond to any redaction requests it might receive. She advocated for the agency to be exempt from this requirement.