A son of Catholic High and LSU Law, two years into elected office, has made himself
the errand-boy of an agenda designed to take power back from Black voters, queer kids,
pregnant women, and the city of New Orleans.
The pelican feeds her young from her own chest. This man feeds off of ours.
A recall petition is only valid if it is signed by a qualified elector of the voting area — in this case, Louisiana House District 68. The East Baton Rouge Registrar of Voters will not count a signature from someone registered outside the district. Before you sign, confirm you are in HD 68, and when you sign, you will need to enter your ward and precinct alongside your signature.
The map above is the authoritative House District 68 boundary published by the Louisiana Legislature under Act 4 of the 1st Extraordinary Session, 2022. Streets bordering the district are labeled on the PDF. If you cannot tell from the map whether your home is inside the line, use the Voter Portal below to look up your registered address — it will tell you your House district, ward, and precinct.
The Louisiana Secretary of State's Voter Portal. Look up your registration, confirm your House district, and find the ward/precinct you'll enter on your petition signature.
Search voterportal.sos.la.gov 2GeauxVote Online Registration. You'll need a Louisiana driver's license or state ID. Register at least 20 days before the next election you wish to vote in.
Register at GeauxVote 3The Legislature's full map index. Useful if you're not sure which House district you live in — select your district number from the drop-down.
Open legis.la.gov directory
Steve Raborn
City Hall, 222 St. Louis St., Rm 201
Baton Rouge, LA 70802
M–F 8:00–4:30
The case for recalling Dixon Wallace McMakin is not that he voted for bills we disagree with. The case is that he has, in the space of two years, made himself the youngest and most reliable instrument of a statewide consolidation of power that decimates East Baton Rouge, overrides the electorate of New Orleans, and re-draws the judiciary whiter than the people it serves.
He is District 68's representative in name. In practice he represents the Governor's mansion, the Attorney General's office, and a future campaign ladder that — after this week — no longer includes Congress.
I'm going to vote for this today, I'm going to vote for it tomorrow. And I'm going to vote for this bill the rest of my life. — Rep. McMakin, on the House floor, presenting SB 256 to eliminate New Orleans Clerk-elect Calvin Duncan
Every item below is drawn from the public legislative record and contemporaneous reporting.
Presented SB 256 on the House floor to abolish the Orleans Parish Clerk of Criminal Court just before Calvin Duncan — a wrongfully convicted, exonerated man elected by 60%+ of New Orleans voters — was to take office.
His own bills merge Orleans Parish's civil, criminal, and juvenile district courts into a single "41st JDC," eliminating judgeships in an overwhelmingly Black, overwhelmingly Democratic city. The Louisiana ACLU called the package a "racist grab on New Orleans courts."
Act 243 (HB 124, 2025) redrew EBR's district court into two 7-seat subdistricts plus an at-large seat — a structure now being challenged in federal court as a violation of the 1986 Clark v. Edwards consent decree.
The EBR subdistrict of the 1st Circuit currently has one Black judge and three white judges despite sharing identical demographics with the parish. Legislators — McMakin among them — have year after year declined to fix it.
From the beginning he has supported St. George — the white-flight breakaway city approved by voters with his public blessing — which has drained the general fund of the City of Baton Rouge and is now being threatened as a template for breaking apart the EBR school system on May 16.
McMakin supports Louisiana's abortion regime as written, treating the absence of rape or incest exceptions as a feature, not a flaw. Under the law he champions, an eight-year-old raped by her father is required to carry the pregnancy to term. He does not disclaim that outcome. He endorses it.
Consistent votes against LGBTQ+ protections including measures that force schools to deadname trans students. Opposed to marriage equality as a matter of stated policy.
The LSU Mounds are on the National Register of Historic Places and among the oldest human-made structures in the Western Hemisphere. He does not treat their preservation as a priority worth a vote.
He filed the very first House bill of the session to open Louisiana's constitution up for rewriting — the same project Jeff Landry failed to pass in 2024, resurrected by his Baton Rouge understudy.
Pushing legislation framed as "transparency" that in practice entrenches HOA boards' authority over the people who live under them.
Because what Louisiana needs, apparently, is for DMV visits to triple.
Announced his bid for the open 5th Congressional District in January 2026 — two years into a four-year House term. Withdrew in April after Trump endorsed Blake Miguez. He is now serving the remainder of the term he was trying to leave.
McMakin is not the author of this agenda. He is its errand-runner. When Baton Rouge voters ask themselves "whose priorities is my representative advancing," the answer is everyone except them.
Louisiana's legislative maps — including those that produced House District 68 — have been the subject of protracted federal litigation under Robinson v. Ardoin and Nairne v. Ardoin. A federal district court in Nairne ruled Louisiana's state house and senate maps violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by diluting Black voting strength.
Put plainly: the district Dixon McMakin represents exists in the shape it does because Louisiana declined to draw a map that would have given Black voters a fair chance to elect a representative of their choice. He is at the table, in part, because someone else was kept from it.
He has done nothing in two years to treat that fact as a moral obligation. He has done the opposite — voted, again and again, to entrench the same logic elsewhere.
§ 1300.1 — Who can be recalled: "Any public officer, excepting judges of the courts of record, may be recalled in accordance with the provisions of this Chapter." A state representative is an eligible public officer. A recall petition may not be accepted if fewer than six months remain in the officer's term.
§ 1300.2 — How it starts: A chairman and vice-chairman file a copy of the petition (on the Secretary of State's approved form) with the Louisiana Secretary of State, along with photo IDs or residency documents. No signatures may be collected until the Secretary endorses the petition. All signatures must be handwritten, dated, and from registered voters of the voting area. The petition must contain a clear statement of the reason(s) for recall.1
§ 1300.3 — Certification: The EBR Registrar of Voters certifies the signature count within 20 working days of submission. If the threshold is met, the petition is forwarded to the Governor, who must issue an election proclamation within 15 days.
La. R.S. 18:1300.2(B)(3) sets a sliding-scale signature requirement based on the number of qualified electors in the voting area:
| Registered voters in the voting area | Signatures required |
|---|---|
| 100,000 or more | 20% |
| 25,000 – 99,999 (← House District 68) | 25% |
| 1,000 – 24,999 | 33⅓% |
| Fewer than 1,000 | 40% |
According to the Louisiana Secretary of State's Statewide Report of Registered Voters dated April 1, 2026, House District 68 contained 28,732 registered voters.2 That places the district in the 25,000–99,999 bracket, with a statutory threshold of 25%.
In practice, a responsible recall campaign collects 15–20% above target to survive the inevitable signatures that are stricken during Registrar review — illegible handwriting, missing dates, signers who have moved, signers not registered at the time of signing, and so on. That puts the real collection goal at roughly 8,260 to 8,620 raw signatures.
The bracket is still close to the floor. 28,732 is 3,732 above the 25,000 cutoff. If the rolls drop below 25,000 on the filing date — and voter-roll cleanings can move a district by thousands in a single cycle — the district falls into the 1,000–24,999 tier at 33⅓% (roughly 8,300–9,400 signatures required). The filing number is the number certified by the EBR Registrar of Voters on the date the petition copy is filed; pull a fresh count immediately before you file.
180-day clock and procedure. Once the SoS endorses the filed petition, you have 180 days to collect and submit. All signatures must be handwritten and dated. The petition form is the SoS's "Recall Petition (Non-Statewide)" Rev. 08/25.
Not Galvan. Not Yenni. Not Broussard. Not Cantrell. In 2020–21, an effort to recall Governor John Bel Edwards submitted 26,679 signatures against a statewide requirement of more than 600,000 and failed.3 Rep. Paul Hollis's 2023 reform bill (HB 212) — which would have pegged the threshold to turnout rather than registration — passed the Louisiana House 71–29 but died in Senate & Governmental Affairs.4 The current bar is exactly as steep as it looks.
For scale: in the October 2023 HD 68 primary, turnout was approximately 40% of registered voters,5 and the November runoff produced a margin between McMakin and Davis of roughly one percentage point.6 To recall him, this campaign needs to collect valid signatures from more District 68 voters than turned out for most individual candidates in the election that put him there.
Steep is not impossible. It is simply honest. A recall campaign that plans for 8,600 raw signatures and runs a disciplined 180-day ground operation — with trained circulators, verified voter lists, weekend canvasses, and church, neighborhood association, and union partnerships — has a path. A recall campaign that doesn't plan for those numbers does not.
Louisiana recognizes only one recall petition form: the one approved by the Attorney General and issued by the Secretary of State. The PDF below is the official, current version (Rev. 08/25). It is the only document that will be accepted by the EBR Registrar of Voters.
Do not modify it. Each signer must personally sign, print an address, enter their ward and precinct, and date beside their signature. If you don't know your ward/precinct, use tool #2 above before you sign.
⬇ Official Recall Petition (PDF)The millennial generation inherited a Louisiana where the people our age who stayed did so because we loved it. We loved the food, the music, the rivers, the Sundays, the cousins, the ancient mounds on the LSU campus, the fact that our capital city sits in the same parish as our state university.
Dixon McMakin is embarrassing his generation, his law school, his hometown, and his state. He is not building anything. He is dismantling — clerks' offices, courthouse districts, consent decrees, judgeships, school systems, the bodies of little girls, the dignity of queer kids.
Congress was his exit ramp. That ramp is closed. He is stuck — and so are we, unless we act. A recall returns the question to the people who are actually supposed to answer it. It tells every ambitious young lawyer in Baton Rouge: use this seat to serve, or lose it.
Louisiana has produced some of the finest public servants this country has ever seen.
Dixon Wallace McMakin is not one of them.