Lincoln Party secretary of state candidate Greg Ballard filed suit Thursday to force the Indiana Election Commission to rule on four pending campaign finance complaints against his opponents before the Nov. 3 election.

Two complaints are against Republican Max Engling and two are against Democrat Beau Bayh.

“The Commission has consistently met in September, but not this year,” Ballard said in an accompanying letter to commission chair Beth Boyce. “Early voting began October 6. The complaint asks only that the Commission convene and decide, as the statute assigns it to do, whether there is substantial reason to believe a violation occurred — before the election, while it still matters to voters.”

Ballard said if Boyce calls a meeting before Oct. 26, “the court’s involvement becomes unnecessary.”

One of Ballard’s proposals in the race has been to make the Indiana Election Commission nonpartisan, staffed with administrative law judges. It currently has two Democratic members and two Republicans, with no tiebreaker.

“I am a candidate in this race, bound by the same laws these complaints invoke,” Ballard said. “I am not asking the Commission to rule for or against anyone. I am asking it to meet.”

The lawsuit says the commission has sent the campaigns letters requesting responses but has no meetings scheduled. The complaints were filed on July 24, Sept. 15 and Sept. 17.

“Plaintiff does not contend that the Commission must find a violation, or must investigate every complaint regardless of merit,” the lawsuit says. “He contends that a complaint properly filed with the Commission presents a question the statute assigns to the Commission to decide — whether there is substantial reason to believe a violation occurred — and that the Commission may not simply decline to decide it while the election to which the complaint relates is conducted.”

The four complaints allege the following:

• That Engling accepted an illegal $60,000 donation from Hoosier Leadership for America, Inc., exceeding the $5,000 cap. Engling later returned the entire donation.
• That Engling’s campaign finance filings didn’t identify who paid for a hospitality suite the night before the GOP state convention.
• That Bayh attended several hosted events where he was a featured speaker but reported no in-kind donations from the host groups.
• That Bayh attended several events sponsored by county Democratic parties but reported no in-kind donations from those groups.

Ballard told reporters Thursday that he cared about the process rather than the allegations themselves.

“What the complaints are (is) irrelevant to me,” he said, adding that the commission not meeting “looks like a political decision.”

He said he’d still want the commission to meet even if there was a complaint against him rather than his competitors.

“We did have a small error earlier in the campaign … They were supposed to meet and work on that, and they did,” Ballard said. “We paid our fine, and we moved on.”

Ballard, who delivered notification of his lawsuit to the commission’s office in downtown Indianapolis on Thursday as reporters looked on, said he’d had no informal conversations with the body prior to filing his lawsuit.

He made the legal complaint pro se — on his own behalf, without being represented by a lawyer — but indicated he’d seek counsel if the lawsuit went further.

Reporter Leslie Bonilla Muñiz contributed.

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