David Voelker

David Voelker was a partner and chief executive officer at Voelker and Conway Investments. In 1993, he had co-founded the former Frantzen-Voelker Investments. Following Hurricane Katrina, Democratic Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco named him to the Louisiana Recovery Authority. Blanco's successor and past opponent, Republican Bobby Jindal, elevated Voelker as chairman of the authority. In 2008, though he had been identified previously as a "longtime, diehard Republican", David Voelker was the largest donor in Louisiana to Democrat Barack H. Obama of Illinois, having given the then neophyte presidential candidate $80,000, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, D.C.

David Voelker's great-grandfather, Francis Xavier Ransdell, was Joseph Ransdell's younger brother; Francis Ransdell and Frank Voelker, Sr., David Voelker's paternal grandfather, served consecutively as judge of the 6th Judicial District. Frank Voelker, Sr., was married to Isabel, a daughter of Francis X. and Katie D. Ransdell. David's father, Frank Voelker, Jr., was the former city attorney in Lake Providence and the chairman of the since defunct Louisiana Sovereignty Commission under Governor Jimmie Davis. Frank Voelker, Jr. ran for governor of Louisiana in the 1963 Democratic primary election but withdrew and victory went to John McKeithen.

David Ransdell Voelker (May 13, 1953 – May 21, 2013) was an entrepreneur and community leader in his adopted city of New Orleans, Louisiana.

David Ransdell Voelker was born in Lake Providence in East Carroll Parish in far northeastern Louisiana, to the attorney Frank Voelker, Jr., and the former Virginia Wilson (1921-2011), a native of Weston, West Virginia. His middle name comes from the surname of his great-great-uncle, U.S. Senator Joseph E. Ransdell of Alexandria, Louisiana, and later Lake Providence, whose political career was ended in 1931 in electoral defeat by Huey Pierce Long, Jr.