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Candidates are describing this year’s secretary of state race as pivotal, with five individuals campaigning to fill the third highest-ranking office in state government.
Whether Hoosiers share the independent candidates’ desires to overhaul the two-party system will be seen at the ballot box as early voting is already underway ahead of the Nov. 3 general election.
This season, Republican Max Engling, 39, of Cicero, Indiana, and Democrat Beau Bayh, 30, of Indianapolis, are joined in the secretary of state race by candidates from three independent parties.
Lauri Shillings, 55, of Carmel, is representing the Libertarian Party, and Greg Ballard, 71, of Whitestown, is breaking new ground with the Lincoln Party. Write-in candidate Andrew Delano, of Gary, is running under the banner of the National Socialist American Workers Party.
The secretary of state’s duties include oversight of state elections, managing business services, regulation of the securities industry, licensing of vehicle dealerships, registration of trademarks and commissioning of public notaries.
Current Secretary of State Diego Morales, a Republican, failed to garner the nomination of his party at its June convention due to multiple scandals, involving employing family members, questionable purchasing and salary decisions in the office, and the citizenship status of his former chief of staff.
This past spring, allegations surfaced against current Secretary of State Diego Morales-R, including accusations of nepotism, facilitating no-bid contracts and questionable spending of taxpayer dollars.
“It’s an exciting year in Indiana politics because of this race,” Shillings said. “A lot of people don’t pay attention to this office. It’s not something that you normally see in headlines or on TV, and if you are seeing headlines about it, it’s usually not for the best reasons.”
Shillings is the creative director at the University of Indianapolis and is a small business owner who specializes in marketing and graphic design. She joined the Libertarian Party in 2018 and her main focuses include streamlining secretary of state online services for business owners, protecting voter privacy, auditing the budget, improving resources for clerks’ offices and creating voter education programs.
“I will say, even if I were not a candidate, it’s really encouraging to see more options,” Shillings said. “When I’m working at a political booth, I talk to people who are just exhausted by this two party system. They’re looking for alternatives that matter. …They always say, ‘I’m so glad you’re running because I’m happy to vote for someone, rather than against a party, or against the lesser evil.’ I’m qualified and I’ve got decades of experience in leadership roles in business. I’ve been working in the political climate, in my county and state party, and I understand how the system works. I’m from the state of Indiana and have been here the majority of my life, doing daily work, making my budget work, raising my family, and trying to do the best I can for myself and my community. And that’s the kind of resonation that voters are asking for right now.”
Ballard, who served Mayor of Indianapolis from 2008 to 2016, was spurred to campaign by Independent Indiana, a group that organized in 2025 to support independent candidates. The organization said in the past two years, 244 independent candidates have run in Indiana elections, with 52% of them having won.
“Independents are winning all over the state and almost nobody knows that,” Ballard said. “…It comes down to the fact that there are no competitive general elections in November. That is due to gerrymandering, not just in Indiana, but frankly across the country. So when November rolls around, there’s essentially one person who can win.
And that lends itself to bad candidates. It lends itself to parties telling people how to vote, what to vote on, and keeping them in line.”
Ballard said in order to be in the race he had to get 37,000 signatures, which cost more than $700,000 in campaign spending to achieve. He described the signature requirement as a “punitive, purposeful obstacle to prevent independents from running for office.”
If an independent party candidate gets 2% of votes in an election, they can form a political party. If they get 10% of the votes, they enter the primary system, in which voters will be able to select party candidates in the May primaries. Currently, independent parties select their own candidates for who will be sent to the November races.
Ballard said if he gets 2% of the votes in this upcoming election, a Lincoln Party candidate would no longer have to collect 37,000 signatures to run for an office.
“What we’re doing with this race is we are creating a vehicle for independence into the future,” Ballard said. “So after this race, we will have the Lincoln Party formed the day of the election. And then a lot more people across the state will be able to run for office. Right now, only one in five people in the state of Indiana could run for office as a Republican or Democrat. …So this is a way to overcome that, because of the laws, because of the two-primary rule in the state of Indiana where you have to vote in the previous two primaries of a particular party to even be eligible to run for office. It’s very exclusionary.”
Ballard served as in the Marine Corps before he was elected as mayor. His campaign focuses include eliminating partisanship in the Secretary of State office, creating statewide voter guides, and implementing unified training and resources for election clerks and poll workers. No matter the outcome, Ballard said he believes he and his fellow independent candidates have already made a big impact on the political system.
“We’ve introduced competition into this,” Ballard said. “I would suggest to you that my entry into this race is what caused Republicans to cast aside the incumbent because they realized what we knew earlier. We had polling that showed the incumbent could not win in a three-way race.”
Engling, who most recently served as a staffer for U.S. Sen. Jim Banks, said he was asked by others in his party to run because “they wanted a candidate that they could get behind for the Secretary of State’s office.” Engling said he is committed to working with the Attorney General in Indiana on any future investigations into the Secretary of State’s office.
“I would say that the delegates that were coming to me had lost their confidence and the current secretary of state’s ability to execute their job well and without controversy,” Engling said. “
And that’s a big part of the reason why I’m here and in this race. I need to bring that confidence in the office back.”
Engling earned his bachelor’s degree at IUPUI and a master’s degree in national defense and strategic planning as a civilian at the U.S. Naval War College. In 2011, he went to Washington, D.C. to serve for the Committee on House Administration, the chief elections committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, before joining Banks’ staff.
His main focuses include increasing election security measures, preventing business filing fraud and cutting down regulations on small businesses.
“My main priorities are one, election integrity,” Engling said. “This is the chief elections officer of the state that folks are hiring, that voters are hiring, and I am committed to ensuring that only eligible citizens are voting in our elections, to building on the election integrity that we have here in the state of Indiana. And I’ll take one step back and note, we’re doing really good things here. We have high election integrity. We run high confidence elections; I think we’re seventh in the country on that front. But there are certainly ways that we can still lean in and be more proactive in our approach.”
One measure Engling proposes is to make ID cards of non-U.S. citizens a different color than U.S. citizen’s ID cards, in order to help poll workers more easily identify whether individuals are eligible voters. Engling said another goal for the office is to review all voter registration lists to verify voters’ eligibility.
“The second priority is transparency,” Engling said.”We’re putting forward ‘Eyes on Elections.’ It’s a portal for anyone around the state at the county level to send information directly up to the secretary of state’s office if they see an issue, or if they see some type of fraud or even just a conflict of interest, so that it can be reviewed directly by the secretary state office. And right now there’s just no clean, clear way to send an issue like that up to the office.”
Engling also wants to close primary elections for Indiana, in which an individual would have a deadline to declare what party they are affiliated with in order to vote in the primary elections each spring. The Indiana General Assembly would have to pass legislation to enshrine that change into Indiana law.
Democratic challenger, Bayh, said he is a strong opponent of closing the primaries.
“I don’t think that’s a good decision, and I’ll give you a few reasons why,” Bayh said. “First, we have one of the lowest participation rates in the country here in Indiana in terms of voting. In primary elections here, around 10% of people participate. The largest group of voters in our state is not Democrats or Republicans. It’s Independents by a pretty wide margin.
“So when Max Engling says that one of his top priorities is to close the primaries, what that means is that he doesn’t want you, he doesn’t want me, and your readers, to be able to participate, to be able to vote, if they don’t register with a political party that they, in all likelihood, don’t agree with. And when you increase the barriers to participate like that, you’re going to drive our participation even lower, which is going to produce worse outcomes.”
Bayh, an attorney at MacGill Law, is the son of former Indiana Gov. and U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh and grandson of late Indiana U.S. Sen. Birch Bayh. He was born in Indianapolis but grew up in Washington, D.C. After serving in the Marine Corps and graduating law school, he moved back to Indiana full-time in 2024.
This would be the first public office held by Bayh, who said he was motivated to run for secretary of state when controversies around Morales came to light.
“I served in the United States Marine Corps,” Bayh said. “We worked on missions that took place in some places where democracies were not functioning well. And so I’ve seen firsthand what this can look like if it breaks down. And knowing that, I felt compelled to try and make a change.”
He said his first act of secretary of state will be to open an independent audit of Diego Morales’ office. His initiatives also include protecting early voting and ending straight-ticket voting in Indiana.
“We have to end straight ticket voting in our state,” Bayh said. “We’re one of only six states in the country which has this system. And what this means, is that the first page on folks’ ballots when they go and vote this fall won’t have a list of names or offices on it. It will just have political parties, red team and blue team. And this has created an environment in our state where people are succeeding in public life, not based on their individual merits. At the time, people don’t even know the names of the folks they’re voting for.
They’re succeeding because they’re wearing the most popular-colored jersey. That’s not sound policy, and it’s also driven competition very low in our state…”
The fifth individual campaigning for the office is Delano, a write-in candidate for the National Socialist American Workers party. Delano was born in Munster and raised in Hammond, and spent 12 years as a real estate investor and licensed contractor before becoming a business owner. According to his campaign website, delano4sos.com, Delano is currently the CEO of Silicon Ridge, a tech startup under The InGroup umbrella, “a multi-brand portfolio he founded in Lake County spanning technology, construction, energy, and media.”
Delano previously ran for Mayor of Gary in 2023 and Lake County Coroner in 2024. In the 2024 coroner’s race, the Lake County Republican Party severed ties with Delano due to alleged racist, antisemitic and pro-Nazi social media posts that came to their attention after he won uncontested in the primary election.
Delano couldn’t be reached for interview after multiple and the original 2024 posts in question appear to have been deleted. Delano has active social media presences on Facebook and “X,” formerly known as Twitter, regularly making anti-Semitic and transphobic comments.
On his campaign website, Delano lists election integrity, cracking down on auto dealership fraud and business and securities as his main focuses. In a portion of his site titled, “Who is an American?” Delano writes, “We have an organized Jewish power problem in America.”
Shillings said she believes extremism in ideologies has escalated because of partisan politics.
“There’s a lot of nationalist rhetoric that I think needs to be shut down pretty quickly,” she said.
While the candidates differed on many viewpoints, the call for residents in Northwest Indiana to cast their vote and volunteer at the polls was unified.
Early voting is currently open for those who can’t cast their vote at the polls on Nov. 3. Information is available at https://portercountyin.gov/1111/Early-Voting for voters in Porter County, while Lake County voters can find early voting information at https://lakecountyin.gov/departments/voters.
Residents can also vote by absentee mail-in ballot. Applications are available online at indianavoters.in.gov and must be returned to their respective county election board or the Indiana Election Division by Oct. 22.
Anna Ortiz is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
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