Billy Nungesser

Template:Infobox 0fficeholder 'William Harold Nungesser, known as Billy Nungesser (born January 10, 1959), is the 54th and current Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana, a position which he has filled since January 11, 2016. In Louisiana, the lieutenant governor does not preside over the state Senate but is instead the chief tourism promoter of the state.

A Republican, Nungesser was from 2007 to 2015 the president of the Plaquemines Parish Commission in the suburbs of his native New Orleans. In that capacity he worked diligently in hurricane relief. Former Governor Bobby Jindal appointed him to the 20-member Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, a panel named to formulate a master plan for coastal protection. Since leaving the parish presidency in 2015, Nungesser relocated to River Ridge in Lafayette Parish.

Nungesser's parents, William Aicklen "Billy" Nungesser (1929-2006) and the former Ruth Amelia Marks (1932-2012), were active in the revitalization of the state Republican Party. The senior Nungesser was chief of staff to Republican former Governor David C. Treen and later the state GOP chairman, in which capacity he broke with Treen to endorse Pat Buchanan for the 1992 Republican presidential nomination against George Herbert Walker Bush.

In 2011, Nungesser while still the Plaquemines Parish president waged an unsuccessful race against sitting Lieutenant Governor Jay Dardenne, a Moderate Republican former state senator from Baton Rouge. Dardenne received 504,541 votes (53 percent) to Nungesser's 445,049 (47 percent). Nungesser defeated Dardenne in seventeen parishes, all in south Louisiana.^[1] In 2015, Nungesser prevailed in a runoff contest with the African-American Democrat Melvin Lee "Kip" Holden of Baton Rouge, 628,864 votes (55.38 percent) to 506,578 (44.62 percent). Democrat John Bel Edwards won the governorship to succeed Jindal in the same contest over the Republican choice, then United States Senator David Vitter, a Republican.

In 2016, Lieutenant Governor Nungesser said that he believes voter fraud by the Democratic Party is still a serious hurdle for Republicans in Louisiana because registered and unregistered voters are bussed to polling cites and merely sign a sheet of paper to have their votes count. His remarks drew a quick rebuke from Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler, who called Nungesser's remarks "at a minimum uninformed. [He] quite possibly [made] an insult to not only my office, but also our hard-working clerks of court and registrars of voters who are our trusted partners for every election." Nungesser said that his comments referred to a local election in Plaquemines Parish in 2005.^[2]