Does A Clerk’s Mistake Cancel Your Vote?
- Voter's vote should never be discounted due to bureaucratic technicalities
- Voter's right to vote must be protected, regardless of party affiliation
- Streamlining election process, such as one 24-hour Election Day, could prevent such issues
Does A Clerk’s Mistake Cancel Your Vote?
Tony Katz has a simple answer to a complicated legal fight now sitting in front of the Indiana Supreme Court: a paperwork error at a government office should never be the reason a citizen’s vote gets tossed. “It is the voter that I am concerned with,” Katz said, “because if their vote doesn’t count because somebody checked this box and not that box, they’ve been disenfranchised, and that can’t stand.”
The case centers on a razor-thin state Senate race between incumbent Spencer Deery and challenger Paula Copenhaver, decided by just three votes. A recount commission ruled that a batch of ballots should be thrown out, arguing they weren’t properly “ingested into the system” — missing markings, improper stamps, the kind of bureaucratic technicality that sounds minor until it flips an election. Once those votes were disqualified, Deery’s lead evaporated and Copenhaver came out ahead. Now the Indiana Supreme Court has to decide whether that recount stands.
Katz gave the court credit for even taking the case. “Kudos to the Indiana State Supreme Court for taking it up. This is exactly what you’re supposed to take up,” he said. But he was blunt about where his sympathy lies — not with either candidate, but with the voter caught in the middle of a clerical dispute they had nothing to do with. “They did what they were asked to do, show up to the polling place and click a doohickey,” Katz said. Translation: the system failed, not the voter, and the voter shouldn’t eat the consequences.
He also made clear this isn’t about the outcome of one Senate seat. “Even if there was no change in result, it would still be that person’s vote not being able to be counted, and they didn’t do anything wrong,” Katz argued — a position he says holds regardless of party. Republican, Democrat, independent, libertarian — “makes no difference,” he said.
The debate over disqualified ballots also reignited one of Katz’s long-standing gripes: mail-in voting. His fix is blunt and old-school — one 24-hour Election Day, declared a national holiday, ballots counted as soon as polls close. “You go, you vote, 24 hours… and boom, you’re done,” he said, adding that ballots arriving late deserve no sympathy under that system.
For now, the fight over the Deery-Copenhaver recount sits with the state’s highest court, with no timeline yet on a ruling — and no guarantee, Katz noted, that whatever the justices decide will actually satisfy either side of Indiana’s next Secretary of State race.
Hear Tony Katz break it down live weekdays on 93.1 WIBC, or catch the full segment on-demand.
Listen to the “Does A Clerk’s Mistake Cancel Your Vote? ” discussion in full here:
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