Candidate Q&A

What would be your top priority as Indiana secretary of state?

Upgrading the Secretary of State website in all areas to be functional, transparent, and accessible.

The current secretary of state, Diego Morales, has been scrutinized for awarding millions of dollars in no-bid contracts. What would your approach be to awarding contracts?

Have qualified vendors submit bids and evaluate them for total cost, while balancing quality, compliance, and risk for each.

Since part of your job as secretary of state would include election security, do you think Indiana’s elections are already safe enough, or is there something different you would do to keep elections safe and secure?

Elections in Indiana are secure. The perception that they are not secure is being fostered by partisan leadership who are using fear tactics to get votes while destroying trust in our elections. They do this to gain more power for themselves. Actual instances of voter fraud have been proven time and again to be minuscule, while reinforcing that the checks and balances in place are working.

With the negative attention the secretary of state office has been getting — including for no-bid contracts and salary increases — how would you go about repairing the office’s public perception?

I will restore trust through transparency: Auditing the budget, releasing the results of the post-election certification audits, and by running this office as a neutral, professional public service.

What is your position on President Donald Trump’s efforts to create a nationwide list of verified eligible voters and implement restrictions on mail-in voting?

If Hoosiers are worried about election integrity, creating a centralized database of voters at the federal level would be one of the worst ways to ensure that security. Having state-run elections is a bedrock feature of our Election system. Let’s keep it that way.

No- Indiana should not add new limits on absentee-by-mail (mail-in) voting. Our state already has some of the tightest, most carefully verified mail-in ballot rules in the country and tightening them further wouldn’t make our elections more secure; it would just make it harder for eligible Hoosiers to participate in their own democracy.