For twenty years I have sat at the same folding table on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, checking my neighbors in to vote, handing out the little oval stickers, and gently reminding people that yes, the down-ballot races count too. So you will forgive a retired schoolteacher for taking the recount now underway in Tippecanoe County a little personally.
This week, county election officials began recounting ballots in the Republican primary for Indiana Senate District 23, where the incumbent, Spencer Deery, and his challenger, Paula Copenhaver, are separated by a margin you can hold up on one hand — roughly three votes across a six-county district. Tippecanoe was the last county to certify, and so it falls to us to do what a serious community does when a race is this close: count again, carefully, with the doors open.
Let me say something that ought not to be controversial, and in this county I do not believe it is. A recount is not evidence that something went wrong. It is evidence that something is going right.
The system you can stand and watch
People talk about "trusting the process" as if the process were a locked box. It is the opposite of a locked box. The process is a folding table, a stack of ballots, and a bipartisan pair of tired people reading each one aloud while others watch. I have been one of those tired people. The work is slow, a little boring, and almost holy in its ordinariness. Nobody at that table is thinking about cable news. They are thinking about getting it right.
This newspaper does not have a horse in a Republican primary, and I think that is exactly why we can say this plainly: we hope the count is exact, whomever it favors. When the margin is three votes, every choice a neighbor made in a booth in May is, quite literally, decisive. The 21-year-old voting for the first time and the 90-year-old who has not missed an election since Eisenhower are, this month, exactly equal — and exactly as powerful as they have always quietly been.
If you want to be cynical about American politics in 2026, there is plenty of material. But come stand in the room where the ballots are counted in Tippecanoe County. Watch our clerks and volunteers handle a paper-thin race with patience instead of drama. It is the least glamorous and most reassuring thing I know.
So a word of thanks to the election workers giving up part of their June to count to three, very slowly, in front of anyone who cares to look. And a word to the rest of us: the next time a local race is decided by a handful of votes, remember that you were holding some of them. Show up in November. Bring someone with you. The margin is always smaller than you think.