by Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, Esq.

Are you sitting down for this one? Well, you should be.

A couple of things jumped out from this week’s primary. Diego Morales and his wife both got curb-stomped in their own precinct’s Republican convention delegate race — combined, they pulled fewer votes than one Huckleby. Destiny Wells went 0-5, which at this point isn’t a losing streak so much as a vocation. But the one that really takes the cake? Bob Kern. Or more precisely, the ghost of Bob Kern.

Yes, that Bob Kern. Perennial candidate. Almost-Lieutenant-Governor for the Indiana Democrats in 2024. The guy who’d file for anything with a filing fee and a pulse requirement loose enough to qualify. Bob has been dead since April. Bob also just finished third in the Marion County Democratic Clerk primary with 4,577 votes — more than double the margin between the two living candidates.

Marion County Democrats just nominated their Clerk candidate, and the third-place finisher has been dead for a month.

Let that one breathe for a second.

The final tally: Kate Sweeney Bell 37,244 (48.4%), Karla Lopez-Owens 35,122 (45.65%), and the late Bob Kern 4,577 (5.95%). Bell’s margin over Lopez-Owens was roughly 2,100 votes. Bob pulled more than double that — from the great beyond.

Now, before anyone gets the vapors, this is not a knock on Bob. Regular Indy Politics readers know I gave him a proper sendoff last month. Bob showed up. That was his whole brand. Filing deadlines, convention floors, press events, ballots — if there was a place to be, Bob was there. It is almost fitting that he managed to show up to one more election after checking out. Some candidates ghost their own voters. Bob ghosted, and his voters showed up anyway.

But the math is the math. Indiana ballot rules don’t give you a do-over when a candidate passes after the deadline. The name stays. The votes count. (Just ask Marion County Republicans, who two years ago handed Jennifer Pace the CD-7 nomination outright in the May 2024 primary — she’d died of a heart attack in March.) And in a low-turnout May primary where a chunk of voters are picking on name recognition, vibes, or “huh, I’ve heard of that guy,” 4,577 ballots can absolutely decide a race.

Which raises the obvious question for the Lopez-Owens campaign: did anyone, at any point in the final month, think to gently let Democratic primary voters know that one of the three names on their ballot was no longer with us? Not in a tasteless way. A simple “as you may have heard, our friend Bob has passed — please make your vote count” mailer would have done the job. Instead, the campaign apparently treated Bob’s name on the ballot like the weather: something you can’t do anything about, so why bring it up?

Here’s the thing — voter file work isn’t sentimental. It’s arithmetic. You look at who’s pulling Democratic primary ballots in Marion County, you cross-reference against the universe of voters who’ve ever pulled the lever for a Kern (or any perennial candidate), and you mail them. You phone them. You knock their doors. Because in a three-way primary where the spread between first and second is two thousand votes, the five thousand votes parked next to a deceased candidate’s name are the entire ballgame.

If even a quarter of Bob’s voters had broken her way in a two-way race, Lopez-Owens is the nominee, and Kate Sweeney Bell is updating her résumé. If half break her way, it isn’t even close. Instead, those votes sat there, doing nothing, like a perfectly good casserole at a pitch-in that nobody touched.

And look — none of this is to suggest Bell didn’t earn her win. She ran the better-organized campaign, she had the institutional support, and she had Mayor Hogsett’s machine behind her, which in a Marion County Democratic primary is roughly the political equivalent of starting on third base. She was always the favorite. But “favorite” and “inevitable” are not the same word, and on Tuesday night the gap between them was maybe a thousand votes wide.

Instead, Bob Kern — perennial candidate, professional showing-up-er, recently deceased — may have cast the deciding vote in his own final race. The man who never won an election may have just decided one. From the afterlife.

Honestly? He’d have loved it.

Bob has gone to that giant voting booth in the sky.

Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is the editor and publisher of Indy Politics.  He is also an attorney licensed in Indiana and Illinois.