EVANSVILLE — Greg Ballard says he wants to run a clean race and pave the way for future Hoosiers to run for office.
Ballard is hopeful he’ll be on the ballot in November as the Independent candidate for Indiana Secretary of State. He’ll face off against Republican Max Engling, Democrat Beau Bayh and Libertarian Lauri Shillings, if he gets the 37,000 verified signatures he needs.
Ballard, the former Republican mayor of Indianapolis from 2008 to 2016, created the Lincoln Party in March to start his run for office as an Independent. As reported by the Indianapolis Star, if Ballard gets the required signatures and then wins at least 2% of the vote in November, the party is officially in place and future candidates can run under the name.
Ballard said he feels good about the signature gathering. His campaign announced Friday that they have gathered 64,183 signatures and would continue through the weekend until the Tuesday, June 30 filing deadline.
The people Ballard speaks to thank him for running, he said, and are aware of the future implications of him being on the ballot.
“This is getting close to a movement as opposed to just a candidacy,” he said.
In office, Ballard would look to bring process improvement technology to make systems run more efficiently and faster.
“When somebody says this is the way we’ve always done it, that’s when my antenna goes up,” he said. “I think we need to look at the processes in there to be a little more efficient for the Hoosier voter, Hoosier taxpayer.”
Ballard spoke with the Courier & Press Wednesday in Evansville prior to a public listening session and signature gathering event at Central Library. He covered everything from partisanship in the office to how he wants to run the campaign.
The C&P’s questions are in bold. The interview has been lightly edited for space and clarity.
What made you want to put your name out there for Secretary of State?
I think there needs to be an independence to the office. It hasn’t been. It’s been partisan. I understand the partisanship to run to get into the office, but once you’re in the office, I think it needs to be completely off limits to politics. It hasn’t been that way with either party. I will do that. I’m not going to endorse anybody, I’m not going to fundraise for anybody. I just want to make it completely independent so people have faith in it. If you’re running for office and your secretary of state was campaigning for your opponent, that seems a little odd to me, a bit of a conflict.
There’s lot of things we want to do. Voters guides, I think that’s very important. We don’t have one, lots of state’s have a voters guide. I think it should come from the state, and we can do that within the secretary of state’s office. So people can get in and out of the voting booth much more quickly and with a lot more information.
Do you see this as a partisan office?
No, I really don’t. I don’t think it should be. That’s an ideal, but you saw in the last four years it really wasn’t done that way. I think that needs to change. I’m hoping to get into the office and institutionalize the fact that politics is off limits once you’re in office, and I hope that is what will happen going forward, I really do.
Running as an Independent in Indiana may be a high hill to climb, what’s your plan to reach voters who historically vote with an R or D on their ballot?
Straight ticket voting is an issue, no doubt about it. But I obviously have robust name ID in Indiana. A lot of (the signatures to get on the ballot) have been from Central Indiana, but not all of it. Even in the initial polling I was at least 20% name ID throughout the rest of the state, and in every demographic. I think we have a really good starting point, and after that it’s a matter of using all the tools at our disposal. I think we’ll be able to do a good job at that.
How are you feeling with the number of signatures you have right now?
Really good, actually. It’s a little different as an Independent. They purposefully put lots of hills in there to climb, but I think we’re climbing all of them, which makes me a viable candidate. I’ve got two terms as the mayor of Indianapolis. My record is out there for everybody to see. I’ll stand on that record, I think it’s pretty good. Before that, 23 years in the marines, Persian Gulf War veteran, retired as a Lt. Colonel. I think all that plays into all this. Running as mayor for eight years in Indianapolis, the largest city in the state, I think that bodes well for people having confidence in what I did.
How do you see our election system in the state?
I think it’s good. I really do think the clerks have done a good job across the state. I think they do things the right way. It looks like that to me for the most part. So I’m happy with that piece of it. I, like many others, do not like the way the office has been run the last four years. I think we want to prevent that in the future. So, in every elections there’s little abnormalities here and there, but we want to make sure we reduce those to the lowest number possible and don’t effect any races at all.
What are you hearing from voters as you travel around the state?
The most common sentiment, by far is, “thank you for doing this.” It is overwhelming. People are very tired of the two parties. We’ve said for months now, both parities are broken. They only serve themselves. They don’t serve the Hoosier citizen any more and I think that’s why I’m getting thank you for doing this. It kind of harkens back a little bit to when I ran in 2007 as a complete unknown for the mayor of Indianapolis and won that race with almost no money. I did a good job as mayor. I was fortunate I had so many good people around me, I really did. I’d do the same thing here in the secretary of state’s office.
Does now knowing who the Republican candidate will be change anything about how you run your race?
No, not really. We’ll be running this the right way. We’ll be running the way people want campaigns to be run. We’re not going to be calling names, playing dirty. We’re not going to be doing any of that stuff. But we may call out people who are doing it. People don’t want those things anymore. I hear it all over the place. People know I do it the right way. I’ll win the campaign the right way. People want the level of toxicity to decrease, they want the heat to decrease and we’re going to do that through this entire campaign.
This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: Q&A: Greg Ballard wants politics ‘off limits’ for secretary of state
Reporting by Sarah Loesch, Evansville Courier & Press / Evansville Courier & Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Sarah Loesch, Evansville Courier & Press | USA TODAY Network
