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Thank you all for the work you did to support access to the polls for every Hoosier voter who turned out on May 5! You were poll workers, election protection volunteers, trusted sources of information, and advocates to get out the vote.Let’s turn that energy forward!
The natural world is greening, blooming, and buzzingaround us—seeminglyoblivious to the repeated blows to our democracy. Our primary election last week calls for a tally. An obscene amount of money was spent to primary Indiana state senators who listened to their constituents and did the right thing to vote against redistricting last December.The redistricting dispute prompted $10 million-plus in campaign spending by national groups to defeat the recalcitrant senators. David McIntosh, former Hoosier and Club for Growth President, may spend another $2 million to accomplish an entirely red map. Our win clearly wasn’t final.
The flurry of voter restrictions in bills that followed made that taste of success dissipate quickly. We did prevent the legislature from cutting early voting in half, but a ban on ranked choice voting passed.In 2025 we helped stop making school board elections partisan; in 2026, however, legislation passed to make partisan races an option.Worse, legislation passed by our 2026 General Assembly created a military police force unit within our Indiana National Guard under the governor’s control. The units can go into communities without local consent — exacerbating voter anxiety and disrupting communities. Intimidation can be an effective deterrent keeping voters from showing up at the polls.
We are still litigating the DPOC legislation that went into effect July 1, 2025. And our Secretary of State handed over to the US Department of Justice the sensitive personal information of nearly five million Indiana citizens on our voter rolls.
We will be facing another redistricting effort in 2027 in advance of the 2028 election. The costly message to the supermajority: further gerrymander Hoosier electoral maps.Our fundamental right to vote, to have our voices heard, is under attack.*
The US Supreme Court first gave the green light to partisan gerrymandering, and last monthdealt a devastating blow to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, critically weakening Section 2 and making it much harder to challenge racially discriminatory congressional maps. Perhaps we need to advocate for proportionality in our maps.Indiana votes in statewide races reliably 43-47% Democrat, 53-57% Republican. Our legislature, our senators and our representatives do not reflect that reality.And the fight is coming back in our 2027 legislature, likely with additional election-related bills like closed primaries.
Policies in high-turnout states include same-day registration, automatic voter registration, unrestricted absentee/mail voting and more than 12 hours to vote on election day. Indiana has none of those policies even though we have continued to advocate for them for years.
The tally of blows could continue, but we must look forward. We may be bloodied but we are unbowed. We will unite and rise!
Join me -- Commit to Unite and Rise in the Fight for Democracy by going to https://tinyurl.com/4f4y59j7
*For historical context about the rollback of voting rights, see The Briefing by Michael Waldman at the Brennan Center for Justice. Read it HERE.
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