A new winner has been named in a very close race for Indiana Senate District 23. The Indiana Recount Commission met Tuesday to consider the contested votes, and President Trump-backed candidate Paula Copenhaver came out ahead.
The race between Copenhaver and Sen. Spencer Deery (R-West Lafayette) initially came down to just three votes in Deery’s favor. But on Monday, the Indiana Recount Commission threw out a number of ballots that instead put Copenhaver three votes ahead of Deery.
“My reaction is: I’m ready for the general,” Copenhaver told reporters after the meeting.
Deery’s Attorney, Samantha DeWester, said she’s already preparing an appeal of the decision.
“This is unprecedented. Ballots don’t get tossed for a signature missing from a clerk,” DeWester said. “It’s now going to set the tone going forward for people that are losers of elections that want to overturn them on technicality stuff.”
In a statement, Deery said that the election commission was undermining the will of the voters.
“This was not a meeting intended to find fairness; it was designed to find votes,” he wrote. “We are confident Indiana’s appellate courts will restore the vote totals that have been counted and recounted, and reaffirm me as the choice voters made.”
Deery was one of the Indiana Republicans who voted against President Donald Trump’s push to redraw congressional maps to favor the party nationally.
Trump launched primary campaigns against those Republicans who opposed him. That push was mostly successful for the president, with only one incumbent Republican winning outright.
That left Senate District 23, where Copenhaver quickly moved for a recount.
Monday’s meeting started with recount director Evan Norris walking through ballot disputes in each of the counties that make up District 23 - with both sides contesting a number of ballots.
Copenhaver’s attorney William Bock argued many of the absentee ballots didn’t have the correct circuit court seal or signature - and that absentee ballots were more susceptible to fraud. Bock argued that because the election was one of the closest in Indiana’s history, the commission had a duty to hold ballots to the highest standard.
“I don’t want to be here until December 31st,” said recount commissioner Michael Claytor, as Bock continued to go through ballots. Originally hundreds of ballots were going to be considered.
Claytor noted that absentee ballots were required to meet certain standards, but election day ballots that did not meet certain requirements were up to the commission's discretion.
Deery’s attorney Samantha DeWester pushed back against a move to dismiss ballots because of a missing signature from an election official. She argued that voters shouldn’t have to know what their clerks need to do in order to follow the law to have their votes counted.
“I can only imagine how many thousands, hundreds of thousands of ballots possibly, depending on clerk error, would keep people from voting,” she said. “Why on earth would we say your vote doesn’t count because there’s not a stamp on the backside of the ballot?”
Copenhaver’s campaign originally called for voters to be subpoenaed as part of the certification process. That effort was shot down last month by the recount commission, but the issue of “crossover” votes still came up with individual voter ballots.
Copenhaver argued that she lost the initial race because of democratic voters who illegally crossed over and pulled a republican primary ballot.
Experts have said the challenge is based on a difficult-to-enforce law. At the same time Republicans have been calling for closed primaries to protect them from potential crossover votes.
During discussion, commissioners determined that voters' posts on social media that they had crossed over were not enough to reject votes.
As commissioners continued to work through ballots, they got to Tippecanoe County, where Bock alleges that County Clerk Julie Roush mishandled several absentee ballots.
Roush has called those allegations “uninformed.”
“We’re not alleging fraud or tampering; we don’t know,” Bock said. “On the record, the Tippecanoe County clerk is absolutely inconsistent with what the official record shows.”
The commission approved those ballots.
By the time the commission had reviewed each of the counties, Deery had lost eight votes, and Copenhaver had lost just two. With Deery’s initial three-vote lead, that left Copenhaver ahead by three votes.
It’s not clear how many of the arguments made in front of the commission will be rehashed before the Indiana Court of Appeals.
It is also not clear is how Copenhaver is paying for her legal fees; she deflected when asked who was helping pay for Bock’s legal challenge.
“I have some great supporters,” she said repeatedly. “My campaign is not paying for this.”
Bock has previously been involved in high-profile cases, including Trump’s 2020 effort to overturn the Wisconsin presidential election.
The Democrat running in District 23, David Sanders, released a statement supporting Deery.
“Paula Copenhaver sacrificed her integrity by becoming dependent on dark-money Political Action Committees (PACs) without whom she would not have been close enough to achieve victory,” he wrote.
Contact Government Reporter Benjamin Thorp at bthorp@wfyi.org
