by Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, Esq.
Full disclosure, which is rather the point of a disclosure: Greg Ballard and I have known each other for 20 years. He was at my wedding. So when I read that Greg had single-handedly exposed a fatal flaw in Indiana’s ballot-access laws, my first reaction was that Greg has never done anything single-handedly in his life without at least three people telling him first that it was a bad idea.
That aside, my friend Jacob Stewart over at the Star has written a piece arguing that it’s “too easy” to start a political party in Indiana. As a fellow opinion writer, I know the genre well. Sometimes we write to inform. Sometimes to persuade. And sometimes — I say this with affection, because I do it too — we write a piece mainly to “encourage discussion.” Jacob’s column is the third kind. So, in the spirit of being encouraged, let me discuss.
Here’s the trouble. The headline says it’s “too easy” to get on the ballot. What actually happened is that it took Greg $150,000, a firm imported from North Carolina, and a corps of Hoosier volunteers to gather nearly 70,000 signatures — of which only about 40,000 certified. Roughly three of every seven names collected didn’t survive the vetting. That is not a description of “easy.” That’s a wealth filter with a high failure rate.
Notice, too, what made Jacob’s telling and what didn’t. The mercenary North Carolina firm got top billing, because it fits the thesis that Ballard simply bought his way onto the ballot. The volunteers — the neighbors who gave up their Saturdays for a candidate they actually believed in — didn’t rate a mention, except for the one accused of forging signatures. Funny how the volunteers only became newsworthy when one of them could be used against Greg. A squad of unpaid Hoosiers doing the grunt work looks an awful lot like the “movement” Jacob insists isn’t there. What Jacob documented, whether he meant to or not, is that in Indiana money can substitute for organizing — which is a real problem, and a more interesting one than the headline picked.
Which brings me to Jacob’s complaint that Ballard leaned on “insiders” — paid gatherers to collect the names, and a convention of party regulars to pick nominees. Well, yes. Of course he did. That’s not a scandal; that’s competence. When you have a serious legal problem, you can represent yourself pro se, or you can hire a firm that has done it a hundred times. One of those routes is romantic. The other one wins. Faulting Ballard for hiring people who know how to gather signatures is like faulting a defendant for not showing up to court alone. The Republican and Democratic parties are wall-to-wall insiders too — we just call them “the establishment” and let them nominate half their offices by convention without a word of complaint.
Jacob suggests that automatic ballot access should require a county organization in all 92 counties and a track record of elected officials already in office. Read that twice. You cannot elect officials without ballot access, and under Jacob’s rule you cannot get ballot access without the officials. That is not a standard. That’s a moat — and it happens to be filled with exactly the three parties that already made it across.
Jacob knows this, because he holds up the Libertarian Party of Indiana as his model: 700 dues-payers, 40 county chapters, 12 elected officials. All admirable. It also took them the better part of 40 years. His proposal would set the Libertarians’ finish line as everyone else’s entry fee. The very party he admires would never have survived the rules he’s writing.
There’s also the small matter of the Constitution. Ballot-access burdens don’t get a pass just because a columnist finds them tidy. Courts have spent 60 years, from Williams v. Rhodes forward, looking hard at schemes that condition access on already holding the thing you need access to obtain. Indiana’s 2% threshold sits squarely in the national middle. It is not the loophole here.
And let’s name the part everyone’s being polite about. The “problem” is that a Republican former mayor is peeling votes off the GOP’s right flank, and the “reform” the legislature will reach for just happens to bolt the door behind the two parties that already run the building. I’d have more faith in this sudden concern for party integrity if it had surfaced in a year when nobody’s ox was being gored.
None of which means Jacob is wrong that signatures are a lousy proxy for support. They are. His $1-donation idea is clever. It’s also just as buyable as a signature — only now with a disclosure form attached.
So here’s my counter-encouragement: the cure for a bad measure of support isn’t a rigged one. If we want minor parties to build something real, we shouldn’t design a test only the incumbents can pass.
Greg, the drinks are on you. You started this.
Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is the editor and publisher of Indy Politics. He is also an attorney licensed in Indiana and Illinois. He also ran for Mayor of Indianapolis in 2023, coming in second in the Republican primary.
