FISHERS — The chairman of the Hamilton County Republican Party has called for a police investigation after alleged fake petition signatures were submitted as part of Greg Ballard’s Secretary of State campaign.
Chairman Mario Massillamany said in a Thursday press release that Hamilton County election officials found a page containing 10 fraudulent signatures submitted by a volunteer with the former Indy mayor’s campaign.
The signatures, Massillamany noted, were part of the campaign’s effort to get the 37,000 voter signatures required to get his name on the November ballot. Election officials identified the volunteer and reported the incident to law enforcement.
Massillamany calls the situation ironic.
The irony cannot be overstated. Greg Ballard is running for the very office charged with protecting Indiana’s elections, and a volunteer on his campaign has been caught committing election fraud. If you cannot run an honest petition drive, you have no business running the office that safeguards our elections.I am calling on the Indiana State Police and the Hamilton County Prosecutor to move swiftly, and I am urging every county election officer in Indiana to put the Ballard campaign’s petition pages under a microscope. Where there is one forged page, there may be many more.
Massillamany has also called for all 92 Indiana county election officials to review the Ballard campaign petition pages and cross-reference signatures with voter rolls, and asked for the Indiana Election Division “to flag and audit petition pages from the same collector across multiple counties.”
“If someone approaches you with a petition, ask who they are and who they represent,” Massillamany said. “Make sure every line is filled in before you sign. Hoosiers deserve to know their name and signature are being used honestly — not to commit fraud.”
Ballard’s campaign responded to the call for investigation in a statement Thursday morning.
This is the system working exactly the way it’s supposed to. It’s why all signatures are verified by the counties and why each signature gatherer has to sign each petition sheet attesting to the validity of the signatures on it.The campaign is committed to following all state and federal election laws. As soon as we learned of this issue, we ended this rogue individual’s association with the campaign. The ten signatures in question represent 0.02% of the more than 35,000 signatures our team has already turned in.
