INDIANA (WEHT) – Andrew U. D. Straw has expressed ballot accessibility concerns in a court document.
According to a document Straw sent to the court, he said, “The State of Indiana denied me ballot access in 2012 when I ran for a federal office. Because it is physically impossible for me to gather these signatures, I ran in 2022 as an official write-in candidate for Disability Party… I believe forcing candidates who are both physically and mentally disabled from public service and in poverty as a result to gather 44,935 voter signatures represents discrimination.”
In the document Straw submitted, he explained both his legs, his pelvis and skull were broken by a reckless driver in 2001, he has mental disabilities from Camp LeJeune poisoning and his five law licenses were “attacked” by the same Indiana Supreme Court he used to serve.
In his document, Straw states, “This stripping me of property left me in poverty and pain on SSDI and unable to pay someone to gather the signatures for me. To impose extreme costs on ballot access for hundreds if not thousands of state and local elections… draws the First Amendment clearly into the crosshairs.”
Straw’s suggestions include allowing a candidate for Secretary of State to either get 5,000 signatures or pay $1,000 for one race. He says by doing things this way, this will make way for voters to have multiple choices for many parties to run as choices for the Secretary of State office.
Straw states, “Again, it is not about the candidate individuals for Secretary of State, but the
party and all voters having the ability to put a new choice out there without unreasonable and unjustified barriers blocking the voters… This is a First Amendment right of association that Indiana has been oppressing with unbelievably burdensome and unnecessary signature requirements that cause poor people, disabled people, small parties, to be excluded from even having a chance.”
The full document can be seen below.