Support for this edition comes from OASIS Community. The Lafayette Pickleball Association will host a tournament Sept. 19 at McCaw Park to support OASIS Community, an inclusive, safe, person-centered housing community for adults with intellectual or developmental disabilities being planned in Tippecanoe County. To enter the tournament or to get more details, click here.
COPENHAVER: ‘SPECULATION’ ABOUT VOTER INTENT IN REJECTED BALLOTS NOT ENOUGH IN DEERY’S APPEAL
Attorneys working to fend off a recount appeal before the Indiana Supreme Court and preserve Republican Paula Copenhaver’s flipped victory in the state Senate District 23 primary argued in a filing Tuesday that Sen. Spencer Deery falls short on several accounts in his attempt to get his name back on the ballot for the November general election.
For one, Copenhaver’s attorneys argued, Deery can’t rest his claim that six ballots were rejected by the Indiana Recount Commission due to clerical errors by election officials unless he can produce evidence that that’s what actually happened.
Bill Bock, an Indianapolis-based attorney leading the case to maintain Copenhaver’s three-vote victory certified Aug. 10 by the Indiana Recount Commission, disputed Deery’s claims lodged earlier this week that the commission “refused to count six otherwise compliant absentee ballots solely because elections officials failed to affix the clerk’s seal/signature.”
Bock argued in the new filing, as he had successfully before the Recount Commission, that state election law set standards for absentee ballots – including the six in question, now before the Indiana Supreme Court – for a reason, requiring a set of three specific marks to qualify as legitimate. That included two sets of initials from bipartisan poll workers, a county clerk’s signature and the clerk’s seal.
Deery’s team argued in its expediated appeal to the Indiana Supreme Court that “the voters’ intent was unmistakable” on the six rejected ballots – two each in Montgomery, Warren and Vermillion counties – each cast for the West Lafayette incumbent over challenger Paula Copenhaver. In a brief filed Friday, Deery’s attorneys argued that those ballots were tossed in error. They argued the ballots should have been covered by a provision in state law that in situations when election officials fail to add their signatures or official stamps to ballots that the votes still should count, unless there’s evidence of fraud, tampering or misconduct.
With those six ballots back in Deery’s column, he would have maintained a three-vote win registered in May, only to be reversed into a three-vote loss by the Recount Commission’s decisions three months later.
Bock argued that Deery didn’t make a case that overrides the authenticity requirements set out by the General Assembly. He also argued that it wasn’t up to Copenhaver to prove fraud wasn’t a factor with the ballots.
He wrote:
