Hello, all. It’s been a long time since I was last here… Back in 2015, in fact, when I was a county party vice chair, organizing for Bernie Sanders in northeast Indiana, and a candidate for office. I never did return to the site to share the outcome of that race.
I lost. By sixteen votes. Go figure. A few months later I moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana’s second largest city, and lapsed out of political activism. Until this past year — after the Supreme Court struck down Roe. Since then I’ve taken on volunteer positions as a precinct chair and as communications director for Indiana’s Third District Democratic Party.
It’s in the latter capacity that I write this diary today to share some recent news of a court victory here in IN-03.
Last year the Adams County Republican Party placed a candidate on the ballot for a union township trustee’s office who was previously convicted of a felony and who under state law was deemed a habitual offender. Due to her prior legal trouble, the candidate was not eligible to be on the ballot for any office, let alone to accept office if she were to win.
The candidate in question — Alice Weil — did end up running the election over three-term Democratic incumbent Nathan Mihm. Trustee Mihm approached the Third District’s chairperson Christine Bohm and the CD3 Democratic Party’s central committee decided that we needed to take this to court. We couldn’t conceive of letting the seat go without a legal fight, especially since we were in the right.
Ultimately the circuit court judge agreed with our position. Ms. Weil’s election win was vacated and Trustee Mihm was determined by the court to be the victor instead, which means he has now progressed into a fourth productive term serving his neighbors and constituents in his township. Needless to say we were thrilled and quickly tried to start spreading the word that we had upheld the integrity of Indiana’s elections.
Local media has been very slow to pick up on this story. To date I haven’t found any local media stories, in fact — and that’s after numerous attempts to reach out to local reporters. Professor Sheila Kennedy and TheStatehouseFile.com so far are the only exceptions and we are grateful to both for covering what we firmly believe is an important story.
One thing we did not secure in the court’s judgement, however, was attorney’s fees as part of the decision. The judge declined to levy those against the Republican candidate following our request. This leaves our district party with nearly $6000 in legal fees to pay. A large sum, to be sure, but the fight was necessary.
We’d be grateful for any assistance in spreading this news. If you’re inclined to helping us out financially so that we can rebuild our coffers and prepare for both municipal elections this year and the 2024 election cycle to come, we’d be even more grateful.
Our website is at https://cd3indems.org and our ActBlue is at https://cd3indems.us/donate.
Thanks for reading. If you have any questions, let me know and I’ll do my best to answer what I can.
