A Marion County Judge is ordering County Clerk Beth White to instruct all poll workers to treat any challenged mail-in absentee ballot like a provisional ballot.  

Marion County Republicans argued that the Clerk’s training manual was incorrect when it told poll workers to put all absentee ballots into voting machines.

The GOP said the clerk failed to instruct poll workers about what to do when ballots were challenged and that once ballots were put in the voting machine they were considered cast.

White says she will comply with the Court order.

So far more than 85,000 absentee ballots have been requested.and 26,000 have been returned by mail.

Marion County Assessor Greg Bowes is disputing claims by the township assessors that the property tax appeals are proving their initial assessments were more correct than the reassessed property values.  

The assessors, who are fighting a proposal to consolidate their office functions to the county level, say many of the residential appeals show homes were over-assessed and the County can’t do a better job so citizens should oppose the consolidation referendum.

Bowes says the townships’ math is misleading.  He says while some reassessment appeals have come back closer to the township figures, he says 75-percent of all the property in Marion County was not appealed and the County captured nearly $2 billion of  assessed value missed by the assessors.

In addition, Bowes also says only 10 percent of the appeals have been completed, so the township assessors assertions that the reassessments were bad is premature at best.

The guys at Politico have done a great piece on all the campaign rumors and why none of them are real stories. I suggest some of you read this and go relax for a while.   Trust me, you’ll feel better. 

Much to the chagrin of conspiracy theorists and their ilk, Barack Obama is a U.S. Citizen.

Now get out of your basement and off the Internet and try using a real issue, like taxes and fiscal policy.

Current Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard and former Mayor Bart Peterson are having a news conference today to promote the consolidation of the township assessor functions into the county assessor.  So in that spirit, I’m reprinting a letter  a listener to my morning radio show sent me in support of consolidation.

Consistency Trumps Accuracy in Assessing Property

Don’t let the Township Assessors confuse the issue, on the matter of consolidating assessing duties, with their claims of better accuracy.

The most important factor in fairly allocating the property tax burden is CONSISTANCY of assessments.  For example, it is better to have a single assessing official over assess every property by 100% than to have 10 assessing official with some over assessing by 10% and others under assessing by 10%.   Fair allocation of the tax burden depends ENTIRELY on assessment consistency.

Granted, if every property were over assessed by 100%…that would generate other problems…particularly a flood of appeals…but you get the point!

Finally, the other important benefit to eliminating Township Assessors is it is a step toward aggregation of taxing districts.  Frankly, I’m not sure how much can be “saved” by reducing the number of elected officials and there offices…but I don’t really care!  What I care about is reducing the number of taxing districts!!!  Too many taxing districts carves the tax base into too many small pieces.  These small pieces often distort tax burdens…some districts with tax rates that are much too high (others too low).  Larger taxing districts provide a  more robust tax base and, generally, allow gov’t services to be funded at a more “reasonable” tax rate for all.

There is no defensible logic behind the current taxing district structure that has property tax rates inside the IPS school district nearly 50% higher than the property tax rates outside the IPS school district.  There are many reasons for this differential…but this result is fundamentally flawed on its face.  This is why the property tax caps are not only good politics…but good policy.

I’ll be more than happy to print the township assessors’ point of view if they send me one.

One way to get a feel for how an election will go is to look at internal polling done by campaigns.  If the news is good, they usually leak the results.  If the results aren’t all that great,  they keep it under their hats. But sometimes, things leak out.

Internal Democratic party polls are showing Jill Long Thompson trailing Mitch Daniels by up to 30 points in some places.  Most polls are showing double-digit differences and a lot of split ticket voters.  I honestly think Daniels will probably win with a 7-10 point margin, straight ticket voting not withstanding.

If I’m wrong, the JLT camp can dispel all this by opening the kimonos showing us what they got.

ormally I use this space to express my thoughts on major issues and leave it at that.  But today I have to use this space for a point of clarification.

Lately I have been accused of being a shill for Barack Obama.  What’s funny about that is that I’ve also been accused of being a shill for Mitch Daniels and Greg Ballard.  I wish people would make up their minds sometime.

I think I need to remind people is I am not a pure journalist.  I am an opinion writer.  I express an opinion that just happens to be more informed than 99-percent of the rest of the population, but it’s still an opinion.

And in my opinion, John McCain, who is a great guy who I have interviewed before, has run a bad campaign. Sorry folks, but it’s true.   The irony of it all is that he is the only Republican who actually had a shot at winning in this anti-Republican climate.   The Obama people out-campaigned the McCain people.  That’s it. Ask any Republican insider in Indiana and they will tell you the same thing, they just won’t say it out loud.

Some of you people need to accept reality and move on.  The political pendulum in this country swings back and forth about every eight years.  This time it’s swinging in the Democrats direction.  And by 2016, Republicans should have it back.

Deal with it.  You will sleep better at night.

Another poll will be released this afteroon on the Presidential and Governor’s race in Indiana.   Word is that it will be good news for  Mitch Daniels and not so good news for Jill Long Thompson.  I’ll be watching to see if there was any movement in the Presidential race.

I’m off tonight to the IU School of Law in Indianapolis for an event, but I wanted to pass this along.  The new word on the street is the City-County Council Democrats are taking Paul Bateman off the ethics committee and replacing him with Joanne Sanders.   That way there will be a quorum on the committee and they can submit dueling ethics reports regarding Monroe Gray since the two sides are split 50-50.  Then the full Council can later vote on which report it wants to accept.  Democrats are apparently in a big hurry to get this whole matter off the table.  We’ll see what happens. 

Karl Rove has put Indiana in the Obama column.

The Gary-Post Tribune has endorsed Mitch Daniels for Governor.

Sarah Palin is making a third trip to Indiana in two weeks.

And gas in my neighborhood was $2.36.

I think I just saw some cats and dogs dancing with each other.