The challenger to incumbent Republican Sen. Liz Brown of Fort Wayne has filed for a recount in their close primary race ― the second such recount petition waged in this historic Indiana Senate primary season where President Donald Trump picked sides in multiple races.
Darren Vogt, a staffer for U.S. Sen. Jim Banks, filed for the recount in Senate District 15 on May 19, a few days after Allen County election officials certified the election result in favor of Brown by just 14 votes.
“When elections are this close, voters deserve to know their voices were heard,” Vogt said in a news release. “Nothing is perfect — at this point, any minor mistake or unintentional human error changes the outcome. I’m calling for this recount to ensure we can have confidence in our elections, especially when we had an election cycle that brought along with it so many questions that haven’t been answered.”
Just the day before, Paula Copenhaver, a candidate whom Trump endorsed to run against West Lafayette Sen. Spencer Deery, filed for a recount in their Senate District 23 race, which was only separated by three votes after provisional ballots were scrutinized.
There’s a difference in the Vogt and Brown race, though: In that case, Trump endorsed the incumbent, Brown, because she voted in favor of redistricting last year. Meanwhile, Banks and Attorney General Todd Rokita have been vocal opponents of Brown, stemming back to disagreements over her handling of an immigration bill while she was chair of the Senate judiciary committee.
The two candidates’ reasonings for wanting a recount are also slightly different, though both rooted in the contention that there was potential for wrongdoing during the voting or counting process.
Vogt cited questions he and voters have had about the “long counting process” in Allen County, which was implementing the vote-center model for the first time. The first vote tally wasn’t released by the county election board until two days after the primary, and in that unofficial result, the gap between the two candidates was 15 votes.
Copenhaver, meanwhile, says she has “documented evidence” of voters who shouldn’t have been allowed to vote in the Republican primary by the letter of the state’s semi-closed primary laws.
Hoosiers don’t formally “register” with a party in Indiana; voting at the ballot box is Indiana’s form of declaring a party affiliation. Indiana law states that a person can vote in a party’s primary if they voted for mostly that party’s candidates in the last general election, or intends to in the next one. It’s an honor system without an enforcement mechanism.
But by challenging specific examples of people flouting the honor system, Copenhaver’s case may formally test or set a precedent for enforcing this law.
“Republicans and Democrats deserve confidence in the integrity of our primary system for choosing each party’s candidates,” she said in a statement May 18. “We must ensure that the Republican primary process is protected, and where illegal votes are identified they must be excluded.”
Contact IndyStar Statehouse reporter Kayla Dwyer at kdwyer@indystar.com or follow her on X@kayla_dwyer17.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Another Trump-endorsed Indiana GOP primary race is headed to a recount
Reporting by Kayla Dwyer, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
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