Presidential election years are when most Americans, no matter the state or locality, go and vote. Four years ago, voter turnout in Indianapolis/Marion County was the highest in decades as 54.8 percent of registered voters came out and voted.
This year, voter turnout in the November election could be just as strong.
But the election Nov. 6 and the primary one coming up in 17 days on May 8 promises to be the most confusing and complicated election we’ve seen in many years.
Not because the ballot is long, or contains complicated issues. The reason we’re looking at a messy election is the obscenely large number of city/county polling places that have been changed since the last election six months ago.
For reasons that I’ll never understand, the County Clerk, who runs local elections, isn’t in charge of identifying and maintaining polling places. That responsibility rests with the Indianapolis mayor.
And for the first time in UniGov’s history, a mayor’s minions have seemingly made this year’s election needlessly confusing and onerous for the estimated 600,000 city/county voters.
Some 160 city/county precincts (26.5 percent of all precincts) will have different polling place locations since last November’s election.
How onerous are the changes? Fifty percent of Warren Township polling places changed; 29.2 percent of Washington Township’s; 28.4 percent of Lawrence Township’s; 26.5 percent in Center Township; 22.5 percent in Wayne Township; 21.1 percent in Pike, 19.7 percent in Perry; 18.8 percent in Decatur and 17.2 percent in Franklin.
Usually there’s somewhere between 15 and 30 polling place changes total. But this outrageously huge number of polling place changes threatens real havoc, confusion and voter disgust. This impacts all parties, neighborhoods and races!
Some of the polling place changes are totally unwarranted and seem the product of maliciousness, disdain or sheer ignorance towards voters in America’s 11th largest city by staffers in the corporation counsel’s office and the mayor’s office.
One egregious example occurred in Ward 6/Precinct 1, in the UNWA neighborhood. This precinct straddles White River/Central Canal and Riverside Park from 30th to 38th streets. Its eastern boundary is Elmira Street crossing I-65 into the Golden Hill neighborhood over to MLK. The bulk of the precinct’s population lives in the working class houses built over 70 years ago. It’s a neighborhood who had its heart cut out when I-65 was built in the 1960s.
For years, on Election Day, most of the precinct’s 656 active voters walked, and some drove, to their polling place at Pilgrim Baptist Church at 30th and Clifton. One of the many anchor churches in the UNWA neighborhood.
The area contained a couple of other polling place locations. Barnes United Methodist Church on 30th just west of MLK. And the old Indy Parks Department headquarters at 29th and Harding; now the city garage where wrecked police cars are sent to be rehabilitated.
Mayor Greg Ballard’s insensitive minions stuck a dagger in this working class neighborhood’s heart by decreeing that their longtime polling place, Pilgrim Baptist, was disqualified.
When I asked the mayor’s office for the reason, Mayor Ballard’s Communications Director Marc Lotter unctuously refused to respond.
The new polling place for this precinct is the Riverside Golf Course office at 3502 White River Park West Drive. A major problem. The voters in this densely urban residential precinct can’t walk there. There’s only two access points, 30th and 38th. If you ride IndyGo it’s a mile walk from the bus stops. No vehicle, no voting.
There is no logical or coherent reason why Pilgrim Baptist Church was eliminated as a polling place. The same for Barnes United Methodist Church.
There’s plenty of space in the old Parks headquarters to house this polling place. In fact, if the mayor’s minions understood the city they rule, they’d have checked and found there’s an IndyGo bus route serving the precinct – the Number 5 route. This bus would take voters right to the Parks Headquarters and is accessible to the two now closed church precinct locations.
Mayor Ballard and his administration like to talk about how well they appreciate Indy’s neighborhoods. Changing over a quarter of the city’s polling places, many for arbitrary, capricious and inexplicable reasons, isn’t an administration that puts its residents and voters first.
What I’m hearing
in the streets
State Treasurer Richard Mourdock met incumbent Sen. Richard Lugar in the only televised debate in the hotly contested Republican U.S. Senate primary. Mourdock needed to show Hoosier viewers that he was competent and capable of being a senator. Mourdock did that in spades.
I’m on the board of the Indiana Debate Commission which sponsored the debates. I watched the debate on a giant TV screen in a TV control room.
The debate was substantive. Both Mourdock and Lugar agreed at times with each other; disagreed at other times. But even in those disagreements, both men were cordial and civil to each other.
Lugar demonstrated he still knows his stuff; that he understands the issues of concern to Hoosiers, and could explain them within the allotted two minute response time.
Mourdock had the harder job. Could he stand toe-to-toe with Lugar? Disagreeing with him, attacking Lugar’s positions while being respectful to an Indiana icon?
Mourdock showed he could. Even though some of Mourdock’s positions were extreme (like eliminating the Departments of Education, Commerce, HUD and Energy and thinking that without the health care reform law doctors could “see 80 patients a day”), to viewers Mourdock came across as a pleasant fellow; a good communicator.
Interesting note. Mourdock arrived at the debate location, (Indy’s WFYI-TV/Channel 20) some 90 minutes before the debate; 30 minutes before he had to. Sen. Lugar arrived an hour before. Mourdock looked like he had his “game face” on; Lugar was smiling, confident.
At the post debate press conference, Mourdock was confident not cocky, thought he’d “won” the debate.
Afterwards Lugar talked about his campaign’s putting out yard signs and calling voters.
I’m not one to ask about the ebbs and flows of Republican politics, but Mourdock could topple GOP giant Lugar in 17 days. The election is close, but there’s a feeling growing that Lugar might not pull it out.
It’s going to be the longest 17 days in Sen. Lugar’s long and distinguished career.
See ‘ya next week.
You can email comments to Amos Brown at acbrown@aol.com.
