The timeline has been moved up for the Indiana Recount Commission to weigh in on disputed ballots in the narrow Republican primary race between a state senator and his President Donald Trump-endorsed challenger.
The commission will meet Monday in the recount that has lasted more than three months since the May 5 primary from which certified results show Sen. Spencer Deery of West Lafayette with a three-vote lead over Paula Copenhaver.
An order issued by Recount Director Evan Norris to set next week’s meeting calls it the “final hearing” on the process. The commission had been scheduled to meet Aug. 18, just ahead of the Aug. 21 deadline set by state law for the Indiana Election Division to certify candidates for the November ballot.
Attorneys for the two sides said last week that possibly more than 300 ballots remained in dispute for various reasons.
That is despite a ballot review by State Board of Accounts auditors coming up with no changes from the certified results that show Deery leading by a 6,337 to 6,334 margin.
The Recount Commission last week rejected Copenhaver’s request to question 11 voters under oath about whether they properly took part in the Republican primary as they had disclosed in social media posts or to news reporters that they had cast GOP ballots to support Deery despite being Democrats or self-identified “progressives.”
Copenhaver, the Fountain County Republican chair and staffer to Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, won Trump’s endorsement because of Deery’s opposition to the congressional redistricting plan pushed last year by the president.
Once the Recount Commission makes a final decision on the primary’s outcome, either side could then appeal that ruling directly to the state Court of Appeals.
The Deery-Copenhaver race is the last one undecided from the Republican primary in which Trump-endorsed challengers defeated six of the seven other incumbent senators targeted by the president in retaliation for their votes against redistricting.
The Deery-Copenhaver winner will face Democratic West Lafayette City Councilman David Sanders and independent candidate Joshua Brant in the November election for the heavily Republican district, which spans all or parts of six counties in the area between Lafayette and Terre Haute.