INDIANAPOLIS — Tuesday’s deadline to return absentee ballots for that day’s primary has sparked a furious round of finger-pointing between the Marion County clerk and Indiana’s secretary of state.

Clerk Myla Eldridge is asking the Indiana Election Commission to extend the noon deadline for ballots to be received at clerks’ offices. Marion County received 123,000 requests for mail-in ballots, nearly a quarter of the record-shattering half-million requests statewide. The state is allowing any voter to cast an absentee vote because of the coronavirus pandemic, in hopes of limiting the number of people at polling places.

About half of those requests arrived in the final week before last Thursday’s deadline. Eldridge says about 600 ballots weren’t sent to voters until this week. Some voters say they still haven’t gotten theirs.

In a letter to Secretary of State Connie Lawson, Eldridge says instead of expanding mail-in options, the state should have conducted the primary entirely by mail. She says having to prepare for both a flood of absentee ballots and an in-person election on Tuesday “diverted precious resources toward securing voting locations and poll workers for in-person voting.”

Eldridge says there’s no good reason to insist ballots arrive by Tuesday. She says with the post office facing its own challenges in the pandemic, she’s concerned ballots sent back at this point may arrive too late, leaving “thousands of votes sit in stacks uncounted.”

Lawson quickly fired back with her own letter rejecting what she calls the “insinuations” of Eldridge’s request. Lawson says counties had ample time to prepare for ballot requests, and says Eldridge’s decision to mail ballot applications to every registered voter in the county amounted to a declaration that the office was ready to handle it. She charges Eldridge ‘s office took up to 13 days to process requests, and didn’t “see fit to shift things into high gear” until three days before the last day to apply for a ballot, after a phone conversation between the two officials.

“Lack of prior planning and preparation are not sufficient reasons to change deadlines,” Lawson writes. She says the deadline to return ballots is in place to ensure “security and accountability,” and says extending it wouldn’t help voters who still haven’t gotten one. And she says some Marion County voters received ballots for the wrong party or district.

Both Lawson and Eldridge note you can still switch to voting in person — you need to either hand over your absentee ballot when you show up, or sign a sworn statement that you never got it. You can also hand-deliver your ballot to a voting location — they’ll let you cut the line to do it.

The Tuesday deadline was part of a plan negotiated by Lawson with the state Republican and Democratic party chairmen. The bipartisan election commission approved the rules changes unanimously, but the panel’s two Democratic members have argued unsuccessfully since then for a later deadline.

 

 

 

Cover Image by Jackie Ramirez from Pixabay