Indiana’s Incompetent Government

Apologies to readers who have the good fortune to reside elsewhere, but this post returns to the fiscal, civic and cultural disaster that is Indiana government.

I have repeatedly focused on our deplorable legislature, dominated as it is by “Christian” culture warriors who–at least according to my clerical friends– are anything but Christian. As I have repeatedly argued, many of them owe their positions to Indiana’s longstanding and extreme gerrymandering, and the evident inability of Hoosier Democrats to run candidates in districts supposedly “safe” for Republicans. (I think this is what pundits call giving up in advance…)

It would be unfair to focus solely on the legislature and ignore Indiana voters’ persistent elevation of manifestly unfit individuals to statewide positions of authority. The election of these men (and currently, they are all men) theoretically cannot be attributed to gerrymandering, since they run statewide–although I would argue that the state’s longstanding gerrymandering has successfully suppressed the Democratic vote. (Indiana has the second-worst turnout in the country.) As a result, over the years, more progressive voters simply haven’t shown up, allowing candidates who are (at best) mediocre to prevail, often against far more thoughtful and qualified Democrats.

As a result, sentient Hoosiers are embarrassed by out-and-proud Christian Nationalists like U.S. Senator Jim Banks, and infuriated by our other Senator, Todd Young, who clearly knows better, but routinely earns the gold medal in the “spineless and feckless” category.

According to recent polling, even Republican Hoosiers are experiencing buyers’ remorse over the 2024 victories of our Governor and Lieutenant Governor. Governor Braun’s approval ratings cluster in the high twenties, while the highest approval I’ve seen for Micah Beckwith–our embarrassing Christian nationalist Lieutenant Governor–was nine percent (other polls have shown him at seven.)

Then there’s the buffoon serving as Secretary of State.

Few Hoosiers even know who occupies the office of Indiana Secretary of State, but the intrepid Indiana voters who would vote for a turnip if had an R by its name have installed Diego Morales in that role. (He won despite the fact that he’d previously been fired from a staff position in that office for incompetence. But hey–he was better than a turnip…)

Since assuming office, Morales has generated sporadic news coverage for using taxpayer monies to travel, employ relatives and purchase a very expensive SUV–but none of those activities generated the chaos that has most recently ensued as a result of the office’s incompetence.

As the Indiana Capital Chronicle (among others) has reported,

Political candidates from around Indiana have been redoing paperwork for this spring’s primary ballot as confusion surrounds whether the secretary of state’s office properly processed those forms.

The turmoil stems from questions over whether staffers to Republican Secretary of State Diego Morales were correctly certified to accept sworn statements from candidates that they meet the legal requirements for the office they are seeking.

Morales maintains that his office followed state law, but that hasn’t stopped many Republican and Democratic candidates from refiling the two-page document this week at the Indiana Election Division office ahead of Friday’s deadline.

The trouble with the Secretary of State’s certification was first reported by political commentator and lawyer, Abdul-Hakim Shabazz. Candidates are refiling in order to avoid a situation in which a political opponent could assert that their candidacy hadn’t been processed correctly. While that wouldn’t automatically disqualify them, it would constitute an unwelcome issue.

Morales evidently appointed nine staff members as “special deputies,” giving them authority to authenticate candidacy forms during the filing period. “Those documents, however, include no official time stamp showing when they were filed by the office.” Evidently, that omission means there’s no way of confirming that those individuals were “special deputies” at the time they certified the declarations of candidacy.

Both Republican and Democratic officials are counseling their candidates to refile. The executive director of the Indiana House Democratic campaign arm advised all candidates to resubmit their forms if they originally did so at the secretary of state’s office, saying she was concerned that Morales’ office had “screwed this up before” by not properly filing its authorization paperwork, and that consequently, she didn’t trust them now.

So here we are in the Hoosier state. We have a legislature filled with culture warriors intent upon taking us back to the 1950s (or before), and state officials who range from self-identified Christian nationalists, to incompetents, to feckless, to those who are just “out of touch.”

And then we wonder why we have a brain drain.