Julie O'Donoghue – Louisiana Illuminator
October 17, 2025
State Rep. Steven Jackson, D-Shreveport, has asked the Louisiana Board of Ethics to dismiss more than $10,700 in fines he faces for failing to properly submit public disclosure and campaign finance forms over the past two years.
Jackson, who has also held a local elected seat, has a decade-long history of not filing his election and government transparency paperwork on time and appropriately.
Since he first ran for the Caddo Parish Commission in 2015, Jackson has been fined by the ethics board 22 times, including the seven existing penalties he is asking to be waived, according to the ethics board staff.
Jackson told the ethics board in an August email he had recently hired an accountant to handle his campaign finance paperwork and his failure to submit the forms properly was not malicious.
“In most instances, the reports were submitted, though some contained errors. In the limited cases where a report was not filed, it was due to duplication of information rather than any intent to violate the law,” Jackson wrote to state Ethics Administrator David Bordelon.
The board staff has recommended the board deny Jackson’s appeal of the penalties and require the legislator to pay the fines.
Campaign finance reports and personal financial disclosure paperwork are the primary way the public knows who donates to a political campaign and what conflict of interest elected officials might have. When those forms aren’t submitted properly, members of the public are denied the ability to learn about a politician’s donors and personal financial interests.
The bulk of Jackson’s current round of the ethics penalties, around $7,200, comes from missing deadlines or leaving information off of five reports related to the 2023 election, when he first won his state representative seat.
Jackson also faces a $2,500 penalty for not including all of his income streams on a personal financial disclosure form he was required to fill out in 2023 as a Caddo Parish commissioner and a member of the Louisiana Housing Corporation Board of Directors. He served in both roles before he became a legislator.
He has also failed to turn in another campaign finance report listing who gave him political donations and how he spent money from his campaign account for the year of 2024. The report was due Feb. 15 of this year, but Jackson has never submitted it, according to the ethics board staff.
The state representative has often complained the board is too aggressive about enforcing deadlines.
He declined to talk to a reporter about his waiver request when reached by telephone this month and instead asked for questions to be sent to an “Elect Steven Jackson” email account. He said questions sent to the email address would be answered by campaign workers, who he refused to identify by name and didn’t sign an emailed statement.
“Late filings shouldn’t result in excessive fines or aggressive penalties. Rep. Jackson remains committed to fixing a system that punishes paperwork delays more harshly than serious offenses,” reads a statement sent from the email account.
The state had to resort to extreme measures to collect previous fines from Jackson for forms that weren’t submitted properly during his 2015 and 2018 races for the Caddo Parish Commission.
It filed a short-lived lawsuit on Aug. 15, 2019, to block Jackson from qualifying to run for his second term on the commission over $3,600 in late fees for his 2015 race. State law requires candidates for public office to have paid their penalties in full before they enter a new election cycle. The suit was withdrawn a day later after Jackson hastily met with the board and paid some of the fines he owed.
Over a separate group of fines, the attorney general’s office garnished more than $1,000 monthly from Jackson’s paychecks for three months in 2022. It covered fines he accrued when he didn’t file paperwork properly during the 2018 election cycle.
If Jackson doesn’t pay or resolve his latest set of penalties soon, he could face similarly aggressive enforcement methods. Bordelon said in an interview that two of the seven fines Jackson currently owes have already been referred to the attorney general’s office.
In an email with Bordelon, Jackson argued he should not have to pay at least one of the fines that has already gone to the attorney general, worth $2,500, because of a 2024 law he authored.
Jackson was assessed this particular fine in 2023 because he never filed the required personal financial disclosure form when he ran for state representative. The report, which is due a few days after candidates sign up to run for office, includes information about a candidate’s income, property ownership and business interests for the public to inspect.
Jackson said that he didn’t think he had to turn it in because he had submitted similar information to the ethics board as a Caddo Parish commissioner a few months earlier.
The 2024 law Jackson authored, which the Louisiana Legislature approved unanimously, now exempts candidates who are already in elected office, like Jackson, from having to file a second personal financial disclosure form if they have already done so.
But the law isn’t retroactive, and Jackson will still be responsible for the fine unless the board agrees to waive it.
In previous years, Jackson’s mounting penalties led the state representative to lash out at the ethics staff. Over several email exchanges from 2019-23, Jackson accused the ethics staff of harassing him and treating him unfairly.
“You all are nothing more than a debt collection agency that harasses and bullies elected officials who don’t have the means to defend themselves,” Jackson wrote as Caddo Parish commissioner in an October 2022 email to former Ethics Administrator Kathleen Allen.
The board has also struggled to deliver notice of late fees to Jackson via certified mail. Four attempts to get penalty notices to Jackson went unsigned from August of 2024 to March of 2025 alone, according to information provided by the board staff.
As a result, Bordelon, as the state ethics administrator, decided to personally hand deliver Jackson’s most recent late notices directly to the state representative while Jackson was at the State Capitol on April 23. At the time, Jackson was in Baton Rouge for the state legislative session.
The ethics board will consider Jackson’s request for fine waivers at its Dec. 5 meeting. The matter was pushed from its October meeting two weeks ago until December in order to accommodate Jackson’s schedule, according to information the board provided.