White cries foul on residency, cites other cases

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Charlie White

Updated: March 21, 2012 8:13AM

INDIANAPOLIS — Charlie White was ousted as Indiana’s top elections official after a jury found he registered to vote somewhere he didn’t live.

But White said if he’s guilty, so are a number of other high-profile Indiana politicians — including former Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh, longtime Republican Sen. Richard Lugar and Republican Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels.

A tea party group that is challenging Lugar’s bid for a seventh Senate term seems to think White has a point and is seeking to have his candidacy disqualified because he doesn’t have a home in Indiana.

But state law, political scientists and a 30-year-old opinion by the state’s attorney general all say White’s circumstances are different from the others and treated differently under Indiana law.

“I don’t put much stock into Charlie White’s suggestion that he is the victim of unfair treatment,” Robert Dion, a political science professor at the University of Evansville, told The Associated Press in an email. “His situation doesn’t strike me as being comparable to the others he mentions.”

Jurors in Hamilton County on Feb. 4 found White guilty of six felony charges, including voter fraud, for lying about his residence by using his ex-wife’s Fishers address on voter registration forms. White, who faces sentencing Thursday, said he stayed at his ex-wife’s house when he wasn’t on the road campaigning and did not live in the condo until after he remarried.

One of the counts against White specifically cited him for voting in a precinct where he didn’t live. White, a Republican, claims Bayh, Daniels and Lugar have done the same thing for years.

White declined an interview request from The Associated Press. But he raised the issue during a Feb. 5 interview with Fox News.

“You’re going to hear a lot more from me about the equal application of law, whether that’s been applied to me versus those that are rich and famous,” he said.

The crux of White’s argument regarding Bayh and Lugar is that they live in the Washington, D.C., metro area but vote in Indiana. Lugar doesn’t own a home in Indiana — he sold his Marion County home in 1977. His residency has prompted Hoosiers for Conservative Senate, which is backing Lugar challenger Richard Mourdock, to ask the Indiana Election Commission to rule Lugar’s candidacy invalid.

White maintains that is essentially the same thing he was convicted of doing.

But the Indiana Constitution provides that “no person shall be deemed to have lost his residence in the state by reason of his absence either on business of this state or of the United States.”