by Roger Deetz

Indiana ranks as one of the least voter-friendly states in the US. In 2022, Indiana finished 50th out of 51 in voter turnout, only ahead of DC. Two years later we clawed our way back to 41st, largely because the rest of the country declined. That is the Hoosier civic strategy in a sentence: stand still and hope everyone else trips.

Some explain this away as voter apathy. It isn’t. The 2025 Indiana Civic Health Index found registration is up, volunteering is up, and 73.7% of Hoosiers were registered in 2024. Even so, only 60.7% of registered voters actually voted. Something gets in the way between “I intend to vote” and “I voted.” In Indiana, we have built a lot of “somethings.”

Start with the clock. On Election Day, polls close at 6 p.m., tied with Kentucky for the earliest.  If you work a shift that ends at six, you need a backup plan. Registration closes 29 days before the election, on a Monday that nobody outside a county clerk’s office circles on the calendar. Twenty-plus states let you register the day you vote. Indiana will not let you register the month of an election.

Then there’s mail. Voting absentee here requires an excuse from a state-approved list: you must be over 65, be out of the county, be sick or infirmed. “I would like to vote and I have a mailbox” is not sufficient. Since 2023 you also need a driver’s license or state ID number on the application, which tells roughly one in eight adults without a driver’s license to take a hike… ideally to a polling place before six.
This year brings yet another obstacle: university-issued student IDs no longer count at the polls. Young Hoosiers already register 14 points below adults over 30 and vote at 46%. We looked at the group least likely to show up and made it harder for them to get through the door.

Finally, the part that varies by ZIP code. Early voting hours, the number of vote centers, where they sit relative to how people actually commute, all of that is decided county by county. About 72 of 92 counties let you vote anywhere in the county; the rest send you to your assigned precinct, and good luck if you moved in August. According to crowdsourced data sent to us in 2024 for Marion County, the median wait time was about half an hour and one in four was over an hour. I expect some in the Statehouse prefer it that way.

None of this is exotic. Same-day registration, automatic registration at the BMV, no-excuse absentee voting, and polls that close at 8 have been running in red states and blue states for years without the republic collapsing. The Civic Health Index says plainly that states adopting them vote more. Indiana could pass all four next session and still be the 32nd most convenient place to vote.

Until the Statehouse gets around to making voting easier for all Hoosiers, We have offered Vote IN Time, a free, nonpartisan tool that shows Hoosiers where to vote, what to bring, and how long the line is right now, reported by the people standing in it. The app has been helping voters since 2020 and will re-launch statewide in October. I am proud of the app – but we shouldn’t have to have it.

A state that trusts you to carry a handgun without a permit should be able to trust you to register on Election Day. Fix the rules. Until then, we’ll help you plan around them.

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Roger Deetz is the CEO and founder of the nonpartisan nonprofit group IN Tech for Progress (https://www.intechforprogress.org/) that created Vote IN Time (https://www.voteintime.org/), a civic tech project helping Hoosiers vote since 2020.
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