Lindsay Shipps Haake: We need to improve voter rights, enforce election law

We need to talk about how we treat Hoosiers at the polling place. We really need to talk about how we treat voting, period.

This year’s primary brought an outright disrespect of public voting space, a willful ignorance of election policy, and straight-up disenfranchisement which signifies the need for a new call to action to follow the laws concerning elections in Indiana.

Hoosiers must demand their candidates, their election administrators and their state legislators ensure enforcement of the laws we’ve already passed to make sure that each Hoosier can safely and securely cast their vote.

Accountability requires each of us to conduct ourselves within the law regarding elections.

This primary season, I witnessed dueling volunteers for township trustee candidates fighting to reach a first-time voter within the voting chute, the 50-foot span of sacred space around the polling place that is supposed to give you time to make your choices without any electioneering interference.

This solitary act of intimidation left the first-time voter with a terrible view of voting and harkens the call for an increased amount of distance and space where the voter can walk without being intimidated by anyone.

As a candidate, the duty is upon you to ensure your volunteers follow the current law.

That said, we all must inform ourselves of laws governing elections and the polling place.

As election administrators, county clerks cannot simply look the other way when election policy isn’t being carried out accurately.

As volunteers who donate our time as poll workers, we too must do better. We’ve got to do better by Hoosiers and encourage improvements in Indiana’s Voter Bill of Rights. As it stands, it simply fails to guarantee a smooth and safe voting experience.

There are other ways we can improve on the voting experience. Banning weapons at polling sites would benefit all of us.

During the 2024 presidential election, a voter intimidated poll workers and voters at the First Friends Quaker Church vote center in Indianapolis after being asked to remove campaign-related attire.

According to witnesses, the man entered the polling place wearing a red MAGA hat and a T-shirt featuring Donald Trump. After a poll worker informed him that Indiana law prohibits political apparel inside polling places, the man became visibly agitated, yelled profanities and placed his hat on the poll worker’s head before removing his shirt and exposing two guns and a knife tucked into his waistband.

We also must work to make sure that laws requiring identification at the voting place are correctly followed. Poll workers simply must get it right that an expired driver’s license can be used as identification to vote, but it cannot expire before the last general election.

For the primary election that just occurred, voters could legally use a driver’s license to cast a ballot even if it expired on or after Nov. 5, 2024.

That detail in Indiana law seems to have escaped the attention of some poll workers and shows the need for voters’ rights to be marketed and displayed at each polling place.

Now on to yard signs.

Yard signs, stickers and merch are what I call electoral lagniappe — extras that are nice to have but not exactly a critical path to a winning strategy.

That said, don’t try to have a campaign for statehouse or Congress without a yard sign with the largest font size your designer can muster.

Just don’t blanket the city’s rights of way with signs in unauthorized spaces that the campaign will never retrieve.•

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Haake is a government affairs and public relations strategist at Onward & Upward Strategies. Send comments to [email protected].

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