By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com
October 2, 2026
What follows will be a rant.
The other day, I made the mistake of following a social media discussion about the Indiana secretary of state’s race from start to finish.
The opening salvo in this waste of time and energy was an assertion that the author of the post wasn’t going to vote for Democratic candidate Beau Bayh because he hadn’t condemned Israel’s aggression in Gaza and against Palestine forcefully.
Now, there are legitimate reasons to vote for Bayh and legitimate reasons to vote against him—just as there are legitimate reasons to vote for or against Republican Max Engling, Lincoln Party candidate Greg Ballard and Libertarian Lauri Shillings.
But a candidate’s position on Israel or Palestine or any other nation or people on earth should be nowhere on that list.
It’s not that what’s happening in the Middle East isn’t important. It is.
It’s just that the office of Indiana secretary of state has nothing to do with crafting U.S. foreign policy, so the views of the person who holds that office should carry no more weight than those of your average blowhard at a neighborhood bar.
This isn’t a trivial point.
Part of the reason we struggle so hard to acknowledge, much less deal with genuine issues and challenges as a state and country is because we allow ourselves, time and again, to be distracted by supposed leaders who want to profit from our problems rather than solve them.
Here in Indiana, we have Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith and Attorney General Todd Rokita, two prime examples of this disastrous trend. They’re both snake-oil specialists who think they were elected to be performance artists and political provocateurs rather than public officials with specific and limited responsibilities.
Because they think they benefit from doing so, they run around stirring up dissension and disarray rather than fostering honest dialogue and neighborly collaboration.
That’s why Beckwith spends time and therefore taxpayer funds picking fights with the state’s Muslim citizens by proposing unconstitutional remedies for a problem that doesn’t exist. That’s also why Rokita thinks he should be allowed to set sports policy for every high school in the state.
Deciding to drag us back to the 11th century to refight the Crusades is in no way part of the lieutenant governor’s job description, which actually has been severely trimmed for Beckwith because no one in Indiana state government can trust him—including Gov. Mike Braun.
And Rokita?
Hoosiers’ decades-long debate about class basketball aside, Indiana high school sports seemed to be one of the few things upon which we all agreed. With his lawsuit against the Indiana High School Athletic Association to deny non-white Hoosiers spots on that organization’s board, our attorney general continues his pattern of rushing in to “fix” things that aren’t broken.
So many of our problems as a state and country would be more manageable if we citizens developed the discipline to do just one thing.
And that is vote for candidates who focus on doing their jobs, not running around causing trouble just because they can.
In the secretary of state’s race, this is especially true.
The duties for that office are largely clerical and logistical. Those duties involve keeping accurate records and providing the oversight necessary to run free and fair elections.
A compelling argument can be made that this shouldn’t even be a partisan office. To use former New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s memorable description, just as “there is no Republican way of cleaning streets any more than there is a Democratic way of putting out a fire,” there is no Republican and Democratic way to maintain a business registry or see that voter rolls are maintained properly and legally.
Or at least there shouldn’t be.
There are two questions voters should be asking when they consider voting for a candidate for Indiana secretary of state.
The first is: Is the candidate honest?
The second is: Is the candidate competent?
(By the way, if voters had based their votes on those two questions in the last secretary of state race, the office’s current occupant—Republican Diego Morales—never would have been elected because he failed the test on both counts.)
Vote however you want on Election Day in the secretary of state race but—please, please, please—don’t decide your vote on extraneous issues.
That path leads to still more disarray and distraction.
End of rant.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College. Also, the views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indiana Citizen or any other affiliated organization.
