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With a presidential race and congressional, state and local elections on the horizon in 2024, ballot access is a hot topic of interest for many Indiana voters and candidates.
Election-related lawsuits have challenged Indiana laws as they relate to ballot access for both candidates and voters. Decisions in those cases handed down in recent months have been mostly favorable to existing Indiana law.
For example, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, Judge James Sweeney ruled earlier this month that the state’s requirement for independent or minor-party candidates to obtain ballot access via petition, rather than a primary or caucus, is not unconstitutional.
“For now, under the Supreme Court’s lenient standard for state burdens on minor-party ballot access, a 2% petition requirement, even accompanied by tedious procedural burdens, is constitutionally permissible,” Sweeney wrote.
Among the plaintiffs in that case — Indiana Green Party, et al. v. Diego Morales, in his official capacity as Indiana Secretary of State, 1:22-cv-518 — were the Indiana Green Party and the Libertarian Party of Indiana.
Oliver Hall, founder, executive director and general counsel for the Center for Competitive Democracy, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said his clients were upset with the ruling.
“We presented a strong challenge to the constitutionality of Indiana’s ballot access laws, supported by decade’s worth of evidence demonstrating that no statewide nomination petition has succeeded since the year 2000,” Hall said.
The law in question requires candidates whose parties receive less than 2% of the vote, new parties and all independents to secure hand-signed petitions amounting to 2% of the vote total for the previous secretary of state election to get a spot on the ballot.
Hall argued that an online petition platform would be a step toward making the petition process safer and more secure.
“But as long as these laws remain in place, it’s going to have a seriously detrimental impact on competition in Indiana’s electoral process,” he said. “And as a result, voters are systematically being denied the free choice of candidates in election after election in Indiana.”
Jeff Maurer, who ran for secretary of state as a Libertarian in November 2022, said he was fortunate to not have to petition to be on the general election ballot because his party has established a spot in that race. Still, he said he disagrees with the state’s law for minor-party ballot access.
“I feel very strongly that petitions and signatures exist to disenfranchise voters and to disenfranchise candidates. It gives us fewer options, poor options and further increases political polarization between the two major parties,” Maurer said.
Getting on the ballot
Having to petition to be on the ballot can be a costly process in multiple respects.
When Danny Niederberger ran for U.S. Senate in 2022, he needed 500 signatures from each congressional district. That meant spending weeks driving across the state to gather signatures.
“It’s a lot of work to travel the state and to get volunteers that take time out of their day to help with everything,” Niederberger said.
Niederberger hit a bump in the road when a winter storm hit Indianapolis and the Marion County Clerk’s Office closed, resulting in him missing the deadline to turn in the signatures for that congressional district to the Indiana Secretary of State’s Office.
He argued that the clerk’s office was closed, but he was told it didn’t matter because the secretary of state’s office remained open during the storm. His name ultimately did not appear in the May 2022 Republican primary ballot.
“They told us that they were not going to allow us on the ballot because under state law and state statute, there’s no law that says that one, the county has to look at your signature page, or two, has to do so in any certain amount of time,” Niederberger said.
In the 2023 municipal election cycle, Darin Johnson is running as an independent to become mayor of Carmel. But you won’t actually see his name on the ballot.
Johnson’s campaign began when he sat down with the head of the Hamilton County Republican Party to discuss the possibility running for mayor.
He discovered that because he hadn’t voted as a Republican in the past two consecutive primary elections, he couldn’t appear on the Republican primary mayoral ballot.
“I did vote in two primaries, but one of them I voted as nonpartisan,” Johnson said. “I had never seen that as an option before (and) didn’t know what to expect. I thought like, ‘Hey, I’ll get to vote for Republicans and Democrats’ — naive little me.”
That issue recently came before the Court of Appeals of Indiana in two separate cases in which candidates sued after the Republican party kept them off the local primary ballot. Both cases were dismissed as moot because the elections in question had already passed.
Meanwhile, Johnson proceeded to run as an independent and petitioned to be on the ballot. He said he spent weeks getting signatures and turned in 850.
But in order for the signatures to be certified, they needed to come from registered voters living at the address they wrote down.
Some people told Johnson that they would sign his petition and register to vote right away. But when it came to certifying the signatures, those signers didn’t count as people with pending registration.
So now, Johnson is a write-in candidate. He’s created new literature that reminds voters to write in his name on the ballot.
“I sold off my stock the other week to put in everything that we got into this one (campaign),” he said. “And I’m only really doing it because I felt strongly convinced in my heart that this is something that’s got to be done.”
Absentee voting
On the voter side of the ballot-access issue, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this month that Indiana’s law largely limiting absentee voting to those over 65 is not unconstitutional.
“The extension of absentee voting to the elderly does not impose any unconstitutional burden on the right of those under sixty-five to exercise the franchise,” Senior Judge Kenneth Ripple wrote in Tully, et al. v. Okeson, et al., 22-2835.
In Indiana, in order for voters under the age of 65 to vote by absentee ballot, they must fall within a designated exception.
Indiana tightened its absentee voting law this year via House Enrolled Act 1334, which requires Hoosiers who want to vote absentee to include their driver’s license numbers, voting number, non-driver ID or the last four digits of their Social Security numbers on their absentee ballot applications.
“We had changes this year that we’re putting into place. They have to put their voter ID number and driver’s license number on their application to kind of mirror what a voter does if they’re voting in person,” Hamilton County Clerk Kathy Williams said.
Williams noted her office works year-round on trainings, finding locations for voting centers, checking machines and more.
“It’s not two weeks out, get ready for the year; you’re planning and sometimes when you’re looking at a presidential coming up, that’s even more,” she said.
Julia Vaughn, executive director of Common Cause Indiana, said her organization is unsure of how the changes will affect absentee voting.
“The problem is that most voters don’t know what their voter ID number is, and it can be a number of different things,” Vaughn said.
Another change to absentee voting implemented in the May 2023 primary is an electronic ballot created through a settlement between election officials and disability rights organizations. It will be offered to qualifying voters through the May 2025 election.•
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