Seth’s View – A little thing about Indiana election laws

On Friday I attended the “public meeting” that the County Election Board held. I put public meeting in quotes because it wasn’t really public. The voting portion of the board (Carmen Oswalt and Carol Grove) left the room for the discussion and just came back to tell us what they decided, making me wonder if it’s even legal, but that is a question for another time (yes, I will be asking it).

So, the meeting is held, Carmen and Carol leave the room and return five or so minutes later with a verdict for Fran Felts’ date changing actions. Not guilty. (Local media report this claim like Carmen and Carol investigated the situation. They didn’t.)

Anyway, this is where it gets good (and by good, I mean bad for citizens of Huntington). Carmen then informs the attending public of the changes that will be taking place in order to prevent this from happening again. And I should note that by “this” I think she meant the whole scrutiny of the candidacy form and not the adding a candidate to the list after the filing deadline. So here is the new rule: No working candidate filing lists will be released from the Clerk’s office until AFTER the election board certifies the list on the Monday following the election filing deadline the previous Friday.

WOW! WOW! WOW! WOW!!!

Sorry for the outburst there. I had to get it out of my system.

Let me get this straight. In order to prevent a candidate from getting added to the filing list after the noon deadline scrutiny of a candidate’s filing form, the Clerk’s Office will no longer release the “working list” to the public until the Monday following the deadline and only after the Election Board certifies the results.

A part of me wants to drag this out and tell you how I feel about this and another part of me just wants to tell you that what they said they’re going to do would be illegal. So I’ll just say it:  IT’S ILLEGAL WHAT THEY ARE SAYING THEY ARE GOING TO DO!!!!

First from the Indiana Public Access Council Website regarding records that are open to the public, they say that “any record that is created, received, retained, maintained or filed by or with a public agency is a ‘public record.’”  Sounds to me like a “working list” would be a record that is created, maintained, or retained, yes/no?

And next, (this one’s a whopper!) here’s the Indiana election law code regarding the release candidate lists:

IC 3-8-2-13
Release of list of candidates
Sec. 13. Immediately after the deadline for filing, the election division and each circuit court clerk shall certify and release to the public a list of the candidates of each political party for each office. The election division and circuit court clerk shall also release to the public a list of all declarations of candidacy whose validity has been questioned under IC 3-8-1-2.

So there’s that part of it.  BUT, let’s get past all this “in the future law breaking” stuff and go back a bit. Why did I say that’s a whopper? Because if the Clerk’s office was following the law as described in IC 3-8-2-13  on Friday, February 19, 2010, then they should have IMMEDIATELY certified and released a list of candidates.

Give or take a little, I think 34 minutes will suffice as ‘immediately’ for the list that was released from the Clerk’s Office at 12:34 p.m. But that list was missing Kristopher Underwood’s candidacy for Huntington Township Board. (You know, the candidacy that had the date on the filing form admittedly hand-altered by the Fran Felts because the official stamp read February 20 which was after the filing deadline?  Yes, the one that the election board voted on and found no indication of fraud. Yep, that one).

So now my question is, does the list that was released at 4:23 p.m. with Kristopher Underwood’s candidacy on it count as being released IMMEDIATELY?  I can be lenient and allow 34 minutes as “immediately,” but 4 hours and 23 minutes just reeks of a delay game to me. That’s more time than candidates had all that day to file.  Four hours and 23 minutes is enough time to add several candidates to the list if someone wished to do so.

But I guess I shouldn’t complain… 4 hours and 23 minutes is better than waiting the whole weekend as Carmen said the media will have to do.  Why, a whole weekend would be long enough to attend a Republican breakfast on Saturday and leisurely discuss who all has filed for what positions and which positions are still open. And even after the breakfast it would still leave enough time to go ahead and add an extra name or three to the filing list and then just change the time on the Clerk’s stamp to back date and file candidacy forms.

But I don’t think anyone in Huntington would do that.  Do you?