Whether Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales stays on the Republican ticket this fall is the key question facing state party convention delegates.

Morales lost endorsements in recent weeks from several top Republican leaders in his reelection bid after a string of office spending and travel controversies. He faces three challengers for the party’s nomination at the June 20 convention to take on Democratic nominee Beau Bayh and Libertarian nominee Laura Shillings in the general election.

Morales and challengers Max Engling, Jamie Reitenour and David Shelton are all working to build support among the some 1,800 GOP delegates through in-person meetings, phone calls and online messages.

Here is a look at the sales pitch from each candidate:

Diego Morales

Morales highlights his 2022 election success — when he defeated incumbent Secretary of State Holli Sullivan at the GOP convention. He maintains he has a proven record on issues such as improving the state’s “election integrity” and supports closing Indiana primaries so only registered party members can vote.

“I am the only candidate who has a long record of accomplishments,” Morales said during a recent delegate meeting. “I am the only candidate who has millions of dollars, so we can beat the Democrats in November. It will tak0e money and I already have raised millions of dollars, and more is coming.”

Morales had $1 million-plus in his campaign fund at the end of March. Bayh, the son of former Sen. Evan Bayh, has raised more than $2 million for his campaign.

Morales dismisses the controversies during his time in office as attacks on his work for tighter election laws and support for President Donald Trump. He’s rejected calls from some Republicans that he drop out of the race and describes himself as a target of “political retribution.”

“I am battle tested,” Morales said. “I am the guy who’s been fighting for our elections, and I am going to continue to fight, fight, fight. I am not backing down.”

Max Engling

Engling — a senior adviser and regional director to U.S. Sen. Jim Banks — entered the race on May 20, the day before the filing deadline. His boss and several other top state Republicans threw their support to Engling after Morales previously had much of the GOP’s hierarchy’s support.

Engling paints a dire picture of Democrats gaining influence in Indiana if Bayh is able to give his party its first statewide election win since 2012.

“They have turned their attention towards the secretary of state’s offices because Democrats know, maybe even better than we know, sometimes, that if you control the elections function of the state, you can change the state very quickly,” Engling said during a Republican delegate meeting last month.

Engling also advocates for closing Indiana’s primaries, blaming Democrats voting in Republican primaries to elect a person who “doesn’t actually fit the district that they’re running for and is a much more moderate person in that position.”

He describes inadequate oversight in another of the office’s functions — business registrations. He said the office must step up monitoring for irregularities, such as alleged fraudulent trucking companies whose owners are looking to evade legal responsibility for crashes.

“I’m going to raise my hand, say ‘Let’s take this as an issue and bring it to the folks that can look at that,’ and usually that’s in the (attorney general’s) office,” Engling said.

Engling says he’ll be an effective advocate with legislators for tighter voting laws.

He points to his experience from a dozen years in Washington as a Republican congressional staffer. He often doesn’t specify that he was an aide to then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy for about five years before moving back to Indiana in 2023 ahead of an unsuccessful 2024 run for a U.S. House seat.

David Shelton

Shelton has been on the campaign trail challenging Morales for more than a year, presenting himself as the best-qualified candidate from his eight years running local elections as the Knox County clerk.

Shelton, who is also the county Republican chair, said his experience includes helping about 40 counties with county council redistricting, contributing to being named county clerk of the year three times by his peers.

Shelton recently told a delegates meeting that he wanted the secretary of state’s “job to do the job, that’s it.”

“I have become the go-to person from every corner in the state, and I really want to continue in that capacity,” he said. “As an election administrator, the secretary of state’s office is not a step. It’s a destination for an election nerd like me.”

He points to his discovery of someone voting twice that he says resulted in the state’s only felony voter fraud conviction stemming from the 2020 election.

Shelton also ran for the secretary of state nomination at the 2022 convention and criticizes Morales for impropriety as an officerholder.

“I also know to have election integrity, you must first have personal integrity,” Shelton said at an April county party dinner. “I will not create a position and pay my brother-in-law with state funds. I will not buy a $90,000 vehicle at your expense. I will not give out multimillion dollar contracts in exchange for campaign kickbacks. I am running to restore integrity to the office.”

Jamie Reitenour

Reitenour first gained attention with her longshot bid seeking the 2024 Republican nomination for governor. She’s running another unorthodox campaign this year, largely skipping party-organized delegate meetings and traveling the state for her own gatherings.

A top priority for Reitenour is supporting an overhaul of Indiana’s election process to require all hand-marked paper ballots that are then counted by hand.

“We do not want machines that take our data, store our data,” Reitenour said in an interview. “We want hand counting, paper ballots, in precincts.”

Reitenour argues Morales had not pushed aggressively enough for tighter voting laws that he campaigned on in 2022.

“It was such a powerful message coming out of the 2020 election,” she said. “I think, like a typical politician, it turned out to be, maybe, a message for the ride, for the sake of the campaign.”

Reitenour, who hasn’t held public office before, points to her background as a former compliance manager for a national mortgage company giving her the administrative experience to lead the secretary of state’s office.

She says she believes too much of the office’s authority to oversee elections has been shifted by the Legislature to the appointed Republican and Democratic co-directors of the Indiana Election Division.

“It’s my job to protect the interests of ‘we the people,’ to make sure that I’m keeping that secretary of state’s office within the confines of the Constitution, and to repeal legislation that has taken the authority from that office and given it to bureaucrats,” she said.

Indiana Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com.