Elections were held in Indiana on Tuesday, November 2, 2010. Primary elections were held on May 4, 2010.
Election information
Turnout
Turnout in the primaries was 20.86%, with 892,403 ballots cast.
Turnout in the general election was 41.26%, with 1,786,213 ballots cast.
Federal
United States Senate
On February 15, 2010, incumbent Senator Evan Bayh announced that he would not seek reelection. This shocked the Democratic base, which had expected Bayh to seek a third term in the Senate and had thus not fielded any other candidates. On May 15, the executive committee of the Indiana Democratic Party announced that Representative Brad Ellsworth would be the party's nominee for Senator. Dan Coats, the winner of the five-way Republican primary election, was Ellsworth's main competitor in the race, along with Libertarian Rebecca Sink-Burris, and two independent candidates in the general election. During the campaign, Ellsworth attacked Coats' record as a lobbyist, while Coats branded Ellsworth as a puppet of President Obama and then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. On election day, Coats won 54.4% of the vote to Ellsworth's 40%. Rebecca Sink-Burris received 5.4%.
United States House of Representatives
All of Indiana's nine seats in the United States House of Representatives were up for election in 2010. In the United States House of Representatives elections in Indiana, 2008, Democrats had won five of Indiana's nine seats in the House, but public dissatisfaction with Democratic President Obama, combined with the birth of the Tea Party movement, led Republicans to win back two of these seats, giving them six seats to the Democrats' three.
State
Secretary of State
Incumbent Sec. Todd Rokita (R) was term-limited and could not run for reelection. Candidates to replace Rokita included Democrat Vop Osili, Republican Charlie White, and Libertarian Mike Wherry. At the time, no Democrat had won a Secretary of State election in 20 years, and only three Democrats had won the office since 1964.
Olisi was a first-time candidate for office. He was an architect from Indianapolis. Olisi defeated Tom McKenna to win the Democratic nomination for Secretary of State at the state's Democratic Party Convention in Indianapolis, where Olisi's name was placed into nomination by Tom Henry. Tom McKenna, Olisi's opponent for the Democratic nomination, was a private attorney and a deputy prosecutor who had previously served in positions under governors Evan Bayh, Frank O'Bannon, and Joe Kernan, including as the head of the former Indiana Department of Commerce, an administrative judge law for the Indiana Department of Labor, and Kernan's chief of staff.
Olisi promised to connect new businesses with state economic development programs and with companies that might be interested in their services. Olisi promised to support exploring efforts to modernize the voting process, including looking at online voter registration, longer voting hours, more early voting locations and no-excuse absentee voting. He voiced opposition to Indiana's voter identification law, arguing that it disenfranchised between 40,000 and 200,000 Indiana voters. Olisi's campaign placed an emphasis on job-creation.
White promised to defend Indiana's voter ID law to ensure, "fair and accurate elections.” However, questions were raised about whether White had falsified his driver's license and residency, and therefore voted illegally, committing voter fraud
One important facet of the Secretary of State's position was that, as chief elections officer, they would decide control of the Indiana House in the instance it were to be split 50-50.
Until September, the race had been seen as safely Republican. By October it was seen as a "tossup.
In what was seen to be shaping up as a Republican wave election, Osili hoped he could attract ticket splitting voters.
Endorsements
Polls
Results
White won the election with 57% of the vote, but was soon charged with voter fraud. White was removed from office on February 4, 2012, after a jury convicted him on six felony counts including perjury, theft and voter fraud. A ruling by Judge Louis Rosenberg had found that since White had violated election law, and twas therefore ineligible to run, the Recount Commission should remove White from office and declare Osili as the winner by default. This decision was reversed. Ultimately, however, the courts ruled that, instead, Governor Mitch Daniels would be able to fill the vacancy created by White's removal from office.