Many parish-level leaders and volunteers for Louisiana Deserves Better, the statewide campaign to force recall elections against Gov. Jeff Landry and state Attorney General Liz Murrill, have left the organization due to alleged financial mismanagement and poor leadership on the part of its chairperson, Marian Gbaiwon.
Louisiana Deserves Better formed in early May when Marian Gbaiwon and Katilyn Stepter filed the petition to advance the daunting task of collecting more than 500,000 signatures within 180 days for the recall. But now the former parish-level leaders, who still are committed to trying to recall the officials, say Gbaiwon has failed to be transparent on how donations are being spent and has not provided any accounting of the number of signatures collected so far.
When the recall campaign first took off in mid-May, people queued up in long lines in cities across Louisiana eager to sign a petition to recall Landry and Murrill. But on Sunday, there was a different type of recall line. This one formed on Drusilla Lane in Baton Rouge, at an office that Gbaiwon has used as the recall campaign’s headquarters, and it included about 10 outgoing parish-level leaders for Louisiana Deserves Better, who were there to hand off thousands of signatures they had gathered…