Early Voting Is On. The Election Commission Is Off. Ballard Sues to Make It Meet.

Greg Ballard, then mayor of Indianapolis, speaks at the Operation Hire a Hoosier Vet Job Fair at the Indiana State Fairgrounds on April 10, 2013. Photo: Sgt. 1st Class Matt Scotten, U.S. National Guard (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Hoosiers have been casting early ballots for the next secretary of state since Oct. 6. The four-member state panel responsible for refereeing that race's campaign money has yet to sit down in the same room this fall.

On Thursday, Lincoln Party candidate Greg Ballard asked a court to fix that. The former two-term Republican mayor of Indianapolis filed suit to force the Indiana Election Commission to rule, before the Nov. 3 election, on four campaign finance complaints pending against his two rivals, Republican Max Engling and Democrat Beau Bayh, the Indiana Capital Chronicle reported.

“I am a candidate in this race, bound by the same laws these complaints invoke,” Ballard said. “I am not asking the Commission to rule for or against anyone. I am asking it to meet.”

What's gathering dust

The complaints were filed July 24, Sept. 15 and Sept. 17, according to the lawsuit as described by the Capital Chronicle. They allege:

• That Engling accepted a $60,000 donation from Hoosier Leadership for America, Inc., well above the $5,000 cap. Engling later returned the entire amount.

• That Engling's filings didn't identify who paid for a hospitality suite the night before the GOP state convention.

• That Bayh was a featured speaker at several hosted events but reported no in-kind donations from the host groups.

• That Bayh attended several events sponsored by county Democratic parties but reported no in-kind donations from them.

Every one of those is an allegation, nothing more. No one has been found to have broken any law. That's precisely the problem: nobody can be cleared or found at fault by a body that won't convene. The commission has mailed letters asking the campaigns to respond, the suit says, but it has no meetings on the calendar. The oldest complaint is now nearly three months old.

Two and two makes nothing

The Election Commission is built for a stalemate: two Democrats, two Republicans, no tiebreaker. When one party's nominee is under a cloud, the other side has a reason to show up. When both parties' nominees are named in pending complaints, as they are here, neither side has much incentive to schedule anything at all.

Ballard isn't shy about reading it that way. The silence “looks like a political decision,” he told reporters, adding that what the complaints actually say is “irrelevant to me.” In a letter to commission chair Beth Boyce, he pointed out that the panel “has consistently met in September, but not this year,” and that the statute asks it to decide only “whether there is substantial reason to believe a violation occurred — before the election, while it still matters to voters.”

He has also handed Boyce an off-ramp. If she calls a meeting before Oct. 26, Ballard said, “the court's involvement becomes unnecessary.”

The candidate with his own fine on the record

Ballard volunteered that his own campaign has been through the same process. “We did have a small error earlier in the campaign … They were supposed to meet and work on that, and they did,” he said. “We paid our fine, and we moved on.” He said he would want the commission to meet even if the pending complaint were against him.

He filed the suit pro se, without a lawyer, though he indicated he'd hire counsel if the case goes further. Making the commission nonpartisan and staffing it with administrative law judges has been one of his campaign proposals.

The Capital Chronicle's report did not include responses from Boyce, the Engling campaign or the Bayh campaign.

Whatever anyone thinks of Ballard's third-party bid, the question he's put to the state is a fair one for every Hoosier holding a ballot: if the referees won't blow the whistle or wave play on until the game is over, what exactly are they there for?

Source: Indiana Capital Chronicle, “Ballard sues to force Indiana Election Commission to act on complaints,” Oct. 15, 2026

Written by Hoosiers, for Hoosiers.