Discipline charges filed against Indiana judge
The Indiana Commission on Judicial Qualifications has filed disciplinary charges against Howard Superior Court I Judge Matthew J. Elkin.
The commission alleges Judge Elkin demonstrated an inability to perform judicial and administrative duties competently, diligently, and promptly, and acted in a manner that did not promote public confidence in the judiciary.
The commission announced the charges in a news release issued Wednesday.
Elkin is permitted, but not required, to file an answer to the charges within 20 days.
The charges are brought by the seven-member state commission, which investigates alleged ethical misconduct by judges. The panel's charges are public record and have been filed with the Appellate Clerk's Office. The case number is 25S-JD-69.
The commission charges nine counts of misconduct. The commission alleges that Judge Elkin violated the Code of Judicial Conduct by acting in ways that did not promote public confidence in the judiciary and failed to avoid impropriety or the appearance of impropriety.
The commission alleges that Judge Elkin did not treat all litigants fairly and with dignity, did not have order and decorum in proceedings before his court, and in one instance, failed to ensure that his court staff acted in a manner consistent with the judge's obligations under the Judicial Code.
The commission charges that Elkin abused the prestige of his office to advance the personal interests of himself and others and allowed his personal and extrajudicial activities to take precedence over his duties.
The Indiana Supreme Court will determine what, if any, misconduct occurred. The Court can dismiss the charges, accept or reject a disciplinary agreement, appoint a panel of judges to conduct a public hearing, impose a fine or impose sanctions ranging from a reprimand to a suspension to a permanent ban on judicial office in Indiana.
Elkin is represented by attorney Jennifer Lukemeyer of Indianapolis. The Tribune-Star sent an email to Lukemeyer offering the opportunity to comment.
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When the Fight for Democracy Is Personal
Allison Riggs didn't set out to be at the center of the nation's sole uncalled 2024 election, but it's fitting that she is. Before Riggs became a justice on the North Carolina Supreme Court, she spent years as an attorney pushing to make it easier for people to vote, often challenging Republican-passed laws. Now she's at the center of one of the most pitched battles over vote-counting in memory. In November, Riggs, a Democrat, appeared to win reelection to the court by a paper-thin 734-vote margin, but her opponent, Republican Jefferson Griffin, has challenged more than 60,000 votes—effectively trying to get courts to change the rules of the election, despite the votes already having been cast and counted. Whether those votes are included in the final tally will decide the outcome of the race—and Riggs's political future. 'I didn't expect for me to be in a the-cheese-stands-alone kind of situation,' she told me in late March at her home in North Carolina. 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It also threw out ballots from American citizens and North Carolina residents' children who have never resided in the state but had been legally registered. (The court has a 5–2 Republican majority, but Riggs is recused from the case.) Riggs appealed to a federal court, which allowed the curing process to move forward but blocked certification of the election until all issues of federal law are resolved. Legal experts see serious conflicts between Griffin's arguments and federal law. 'This is consistent with what we asked in our initial filing,' Griffin's campaign said in a statement after the state supreme court's ruling. 'The ballots of those overseas without IDs and those who have never lived here need to be addressed; the rest are up to the Court to decide whether they want to be addressed.' Since the election, Riggs has given a limited number of interviews, while Griffin has opted not to speak publicly at all, citing the state's Code of Judicial Conduct. ('Justice Riggs' decision to ignore the Code is her decision, which is an issue that will most likely come before the court once this litigation is resolved,' Paul Shumaker, a consultant to Griffin's campaign, wrote in an email.) She agreed to speak with me because she believes that the ordeal she is going through—and the fate she may yet meet—is a warning to the American people about the direction the country is heading. If partisan judges can change the rules of an election after the election, in a brazen effort to help a candidate from their own party, what can guarantee that votes cast in good faith will be counted? And without that guarantee, how can the voting public be sure it will have its say? 'What's worrisome is this idea that people with power, if they don't like who wins, can decide whether or not to acknowledge the election outcome, whether or not to peacefully transfer power and concede,' she told me. 'This kind of election denialism is a real attack at the fundamentals of democracy; it's like dropping a match in a dry forest. So I see the stakes as nationally very high.' Riggs didn't set out to be a judge. She didn't even set out to be a lawyer. She grew up in West Virginia and attended the University of Florida, where she got involved in politics and started to appreciate the power of election laws. 'I was in school, living in Florida, during the 2000 election, so 537 votes making the difference in a national election focused me early on the importance of every single vote,' she said. But Riggs studied microbiology as an undergraduate. She considered a career in academia and even got a master's degree in history, then applied to law school, with plans to become an environmental lawyer. During an activity fair her first year, she stumbled into a clinic on civil-rights restoration for people convicted of crimes. Riggs discovered a passion for election work and switched her focus. During a summer internship working for then–North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, she met a lawyer named Anita Earls, who was a member of the state board of elections. Earls was starting a new nonprofit called the Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ) that would fight for fair congressional maps, and she brought Riggs on. It was a remarkable moment to get involved in voting litigation in North Carolina. The Old North State had long been dominated by Democrats, but in 2010, the GOP won control of both houses of the state legislature for the first time since 1870; two years later, Republicans also captured the governorship. This gave them control over a pivotal redistricting process after the 2010 census; those battles have not ended yet. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, allowing North Carolina and other states to rewrite voting laws without federal oversight. Many of the new measures were billed as efforts to prevent fraud, though voter fraud is vanishingly rare, and a federal court found in 2016 that Republican-backed laws targeted Black voters 'with almost surgical precision.' Although SCSJ often litigated against laws passed by the GOP—Riggs argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in a gerrymandering case—Riggs told me she didn't view her work as partisan. 'I tell people all the time, over the years, I helped more Republicans cast their ballots and get them counted than most Republican political operatives,' she said. When people sought help through voter-assistance hotlines, 'I didn't care what your party affiliation was. I cared that your vote got counted.' [Read: Democrats actually had quite a good night in North Carolina] In 2023, Cooper, who had become the Democratic governor, appointed Riggs to a seat on the court of appeals; nine months later, he elevated her to the supreme court, where she rejoined Earls, who'd won a seat on the court in 2018. (In North Carolina, the governor can fill judicial vacancies, but jurists must then win election when their terms are up.) She told me the switch from advocate to jurist was not difficult. 'Part of being a good litigator is understanding every side of an argument,' she said. 'The willingness to give credence and try to understand all sides of a legal question was not something that was new to me.' Riggs had never run for office, though she'd worked in grassroots organizing, and she faced an intense race in 2024. State supreme courts have become a new battleground for partisan warfare, and North Carolina's is among the most polarized. The dominant issue in the contest between Riggs and Griffin was the partisan balance of the court and its power over issues such as abortion and redistricting. On Election Night, she seemed to fall just short: Initial results showed her trailing by about 10,000 votes. But as provisional and absentee ballots were counted, she slowly erased Griffin's lead and finally overtook him. This pattern of late-counted Democratic votes, known as the 'blue shift,' was also prominent in the 2020 presidential race, and President Donald Trump used it to falsely claim fraud. It's a product of how long tallying every vote can take, especially in understaffed county-elections offices. 'No ballots 'came in,'' she said. 'They were all there. It was just a matter of counting them and counting every eligible ballot.' Griffin requested multiple recounts, but he didn't gain any ground. Then, with certification looming, he moved his fight to the courts. The challenges seemed like a long shot then, especially because his arguments required throwing out votes that had been cast lawfully at the time of the election, and in situations in which no one alleged wrongdoing by voters. Griffin challenged three groups of voters. The largest was voters whose registration records did not include driver's-license or Social Security numbers, either because they had not been asked to provide them or because election officials had not correctly recorded them. Among these voters, remarkably, are Riggs's own parents. The second group was overseas voters, including some members of the military, who didn't submit photo identification with their ballot, again because it was not required by law. (Griffin himself had used the same method to vote in previous elections.) The third was the never-resident voters. Griffin's litigation had other peculiarities. It argued that these votes were improper, but only in the supreme-court race; other races that included them had already been certified. He also went after ballots in only a few counties that had voted heavily for Riggs. 'You cannot straight-face talk about election integrity and then challenge ballots only in four heavily Democratic counties,' she told me. 'You just can't.' (No one knows for sure what the tally would be if all or some of the challenged votes were thrown out. Votes are retrievable under state law, as the journalist Jeremy Markovich has explained, but whom they support is unknown for now. Even so, one can surmise that going after votes thought to lean Democratic would hurt the Democratic candidate more than the Republican.) The argument for excluding these votes is similar to the anti-fraud justification for voter-ID laws: For its adherents, allowing even one fraudulent vote taints the tally. But Riggs said excluding eligible votes for hypothetical reasons is no better. 'Every time you exclude one eligible vote, you have the same problem: You're distorting the electorate,' she told me. And even if completely eliminating all fraud were a reasonable goal, 'my opponent can't point to one ineligible vote amongst the 68,000 people whose votes he's trying to toss,' Riggs told me. A few prominent Republicans have spoken out against Griffin's effort. One is former Governor Pat McCrory, who himself made an absurd fraud claim in a strongly Democratic county after losing the 2016 election. The longtime GOP elections attorney Benjamin Ginsberg recently wrote a column in The Carolina Journal, a conservative outlet, comparing Griffin's arguments to Vice President Al Gore's after the 2000 election. (Ginsberg would know: He was general counsel to George W. Bush's campaign.) [Read: Stop the (North Carolina) steal] 'It should be embarrassing for Judge Jefferson Griffin to make—and ask his fellow judges to buy—his arguments to disenfranchise legal voters, especially members of our military. Ambitious candidates may not always stick to principles, but judges must,' he wrote. But by and large, North Carolina Republicans have kept quiet or lent support, especially as Griffin's challenge looks like less and less of a Hail Mary. Riggs said she expects to prevail eventually, but she told me that even if she does, the ongoing delay is harmful on its own. 'The longer this drags out, the more voters are like, I'm just a pawn in their games. And what difference does it make if I vote? Because if the other person wins, they'll just challenge my vote,' Riggs said. 'Every single day that this goes on, it does real and lasting damage to our democracy and people's faith in it.' There's no going getting that time back, but the outcome is now in the hands of Republican justices who will have to choose between one of their own and the voters' pick. Article originally published at The Atlantic
