by Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, Esq.

Two homemade infographics about the Secretary of State race have been circulating this week, and I have spent more time with them than I care to admit in print. Here is the surprising part: they are better than they have any right to be. Here is the other part: they both bury their own leads, which is the most human thing about them.

Start with what nobody disputes. Indiana ties minor-party ballot access to this office and no other. Clear two percent of the Secretary of State vote and your party keeps its ballot line and nominates by convention. Clear ten percent and you get a publicly funded primary — a threshold only the Republicans and Democrats have managed since at least 1952. Fall under two and you are gathering roughly 40,000 hand-signed names sorted by county and delivered to all 92 county election boards, which is less a legal requirement than a dare.

Everything else in this race is commentary. That is the actual scoreboard.

Now the numbers. In 2022, 1,847,036 Hoosiers voted for Secretary of State. Diego Morales took 999,893. Destiny Wells took 742,624. And Libertarian Jeff Maurer took 104,519 — 5.66 percent statewide, and better than ten percent in places like Rush and Decatur counties. Hold onto that last figure. It is the pool Lauri Shillings has to defend and Greg Ballard has to raid, and it is bigger than most people covering this race seem to think.

Greg Ballard did the dare. He turned in 41,299 verified signatures against a requirement of 36,943 — the first time since 1994, his campaign says, that anyone without major-party status has cleared that bar statewide.

And here is the part nobody modeled: we know where those signatures came from. The campaign collected in 71 of 92 counties, and more than 30,000 came out of central Indiana — Marion, Hamilton, Hendricks, Johnson, Hancock, Boone, Morgan and Shelby. Read that list twice. Six of those eight are Republican counties, which is a point for the model. The first one is Marion, which is a point against it.

Which brings us to the vote-splitting model, and to my favorite thing that happened this week. The graphic runs seven scenarios. Six of them are unremarkable. Row seven puts Ballard at 32 percent, Bayh at 31.9, and Engling at 31.7.

That is Greg Ballard winning statewide. It is sitting right there in the table.

The graphic’s own summary box stops at “20 percent-plus can make the race very close.” Friend, your own math has the man taking the oath. Somebody built a model that elects an independent Secretary of State and then wrote a caption about how competitive things might get.

I would not book the inaugural yet. The model has a thumb on the scale: every scenario assumes Ballard draws 60 to 80 percent of his support from Republicans, and not one tests the reverse. So of course the answer is that he hurts Engling. You cannot ask a question you have already answered — particularly about a man who spent eight years as the Republican mayor of a Democratic city.

Meanwhile, Shillings never breaks 4.7 percent in any scenario the model runs. She also never drops below two. She is the only candidate on that board who wins something in every version of the future, and nobody wrote her a headline.

One caveat the graphics skip. They present campaign receipts through June 30 as raw strength, which flatters everyone unevenly — Bayh’s covers six months, Ballard’s starts in mid-May. And roughly sixty percent of Ballard’s $876,000 came from a PAC chaired by his own campaign manager, at the campaign’s own address, with donors not disclosed until October. He had burned through 97 percent of it. A model asking whether he can reach 32 percent is treating that money as fuel in the tank. The filing suggests otherwise.

Third-party math has promised the moon before. But I have also watched a Republican win Marion County twice, and the last four columns’ worth of conventional wisdom did not see that coming either.

Watch the two percent. Everything else is a story about the two percent.

Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is the editor and publisher of IndyPolitics.org and an attorney licensed in Indiana and Illinois. He has also been on a ballot, which is how he knows the math never loves you back.