About two weeks after a St. Joseph County Democratic Party caucus elected Heidi Beidinger to fill an open seat on the South Bend Common Council, questions are being raised about her eligibility.
Seven precinct committee chairs in the council’s 4th District, that’s the city’s east side, elected Beidinger in a May 20 caucus at the Howard Park Event Center. They needed to fill the council seat recently vacated by Troy Warner, who left the council to become Mayor James Mueller’s chief of staff.
But this week a person involved in the election contacted WVPE and said they are concerned that Beidinger, a longtime former Granger resident, doesn’t qualify to serve on the council under Indiana law. The statute requires a city’s common council member to have lived in the city for at least a year and in their council district, if it’s not an at-large seat, for at least six months.
Property records show that Beidinger owns a home in the 400 block of South Notre Dame Avenue but she only bought it in September, less than a year ago.
Beidinger defeated three other candidates: Hodge Patel, Derrick Perry and Angela Smith.
Emily Voorde is one of the seven people who voted in the caucus, and she is not the person who reached out to WVPE. Voorde declined to share whom she voted for but she says she’s troubled by how the caucus vote was handled.
Voorde says she had heard about the concern and had asked Beidinger about it before the caucus.
“She had told me that a determination had been made by the state election board about her eligibility and that that would be communicated to us by the county party," Voorde said. "I then asked the county party if that was the case, if eligibility had been determined, and they said they were leaving that up to the caucus members. So I think it left a lot of ambiguity about eligibility.”
Voorde says what she doesn’t know is whether the county party had actually told Beidinger that the state election division said she was eligible, or whether Beidinger intentionally mischaracterized what had occurred.
Beidinger on Thursday declined our interview request, deferring us to Alex Bowman, an attorney who acted as parliamentarian for the caucus. Party vice-chair Debbie Ladyga-Block, who ran the caucus, also declined our interview request and deferred to Bowman.
Bowman says it was effectively up to Beidinger to affirm that she was eligible, and that only the seven precinct chairs voting could challenge her eligibility before the vote, not the other candidates.
“My assumption is all of those candidacies are presumptively valid, that they’re accurate, that the statements that are contained within them are correct, they’re verified under oath, and so the slate of candidates that were put before the caucus are valid until the caucus decides otherwise," Bowman said. "That’s the mechanism that statute provides for.”
Another of the seven voters was Jason Critchlow, the Portage Township trustee. Critchlow says he wasn’t concerned about Beidinger’s eligibility before the vote because of his experience with candidate residency challenges as a former party chair.
“It has nothing to do with where you own a home," Critchlow said. "It has nothing do with where you’re registered to vote. What the statute says is it’s all about intent. And I used to lose challenges all the time because I’d have people who said I live here and it was a business address, and I’d challenge their candidacy and the election board would review it and the person would come in and say, yeah, I’ve been estranged from my wife and I’ve been sleeping at my business for the past couple of months, and I would lose the challenge because the person was saying yeah, that’s where my residency is.”
Critchlow added that if any precinct chairs objected, they should have spoken up at the caucus before the speeches and voting.
Voorde says she now regrets not speaking up but she felt rushed that night.
“It could be asked of all seven of us," Voorde said, "why we didn’t speak up or why we didn’t raise questions, and frankly I think it’s a pretty unfair, undemocratic position to put us in, while cameras are rolling, while we’re in front of the candidates, while we’re in this packed room at Howard Park, to at that point raise questions when no such formal opportunity or recourse had been provided to us prior.”
Voorde, whose grandfather Edward Voorde was mayor in the 1950s and whose father John Voorde is a former city clerk, says the process should be changed for the future. She says precinct chairs should get a meeting with party leaders before a caucus where there’s a briefing on procedure and a chance to sort out any outstanding questions.
Angela Smith, one of the losing candidates in the caucus, says was also aware of the issue and she had tried to speak up beforehand.
“I knew she had just moved into the city from Granger last fall and I did raise some concerns early on, but with the timing of everything and how quickly it moved, I really decided to just focus on the residents and making South Bend better, and then the night of the caucus I found out that I couldn’t challenge anyway.”
But Smith says intent to move into the city is not mentioned in the statute’s residency requirements for a council member.
“I think it’s really important that residents have somebody that represents them that understands them, and if you are only intending to move into an area, then you may or may not understand what it’s like, especially if you move in from another jurisdiction.”
