Ellen Marks
Ellen Marks (Democratic Party) ran for election to the U.S. House to represent Indiana's 2nd Congressional District. She lost in the Democratic primary on June 2, 2020.
Marks completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2020. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
Ellen Marks was born in Chicago, Illinois. She obtained an undergraduate degree from Northwestern University in June 1988, a J.D. from Michigan Law School in May 1991, and a graduate degree from the Vermont College of Fine Arts in July 2002. Her professional experience includes practicing law in Chicago and as a telecommuter from her home office in South Bend, Indiana. Her law practice focuses on securities offerings, broker-dealer and investment adviser regulation, corporate formation, banking regulation, investment company act issues, and swaps and derivatives regulation.[1]
Marks has served in various leadership roles in the Business Law Section of the American Bar Association. She chaired the Securitization and Structured Finance Committee and a task force on Volcker Regulation and Risk Retention opinions, in partnership with the section's Opinion Committee. Marks is a fellow and a former regent of the American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers. She has also served on the board of directors of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.[1]
Elections
2020
See also: Indiana's 2nd Congressional District election, 2020
Indiana's 2nd Congressional District election, 2020 (June 2 Republican primary)
Indiana's 2nd Congressional District election, 2020 (June 2 Democratic primary)
General election
General election for U.S. House Indiana District 2
Incumbent Jackie Walorski defeated Pat Hackett in the general election for U.S. House Indiana District 2 on November 3, 2020.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | Jackie Walorski (R) | 61.5 | 183,601 | |
| Pat Hackett (D) | 38.5 | 114,967 | ||
| Total votes: 298,568 | ||||
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Democratic primary election
Democratic primary for U.S. House Indiana District 2
Pat Hackett defeated Ellen Marks in the Democratic primary for U.S. House Indiana District 2 on June 2, 2020.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | Pat Hackett | 77.8 | 32,708 | |
| Ellen Marks | 22.2 | 9,319 | ||
| Total votes: 42,027 | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Republican primary election
Republican primary for U.S. House Indiana District 2
Incumbent Jackie Walorski defeated Christopher Davis in the Republican primary for U.S. House Indiana District 2 on June 2, 2020.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | Jackie Walorski | 78.9 | 39,628 | |
| Christopher Davis | 21.1 | 10,609 | ||
| Total votes: 50,237 | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Campaign themes
2020
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Ellen Marks completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2020. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Marks' responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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- The experience I bring in solving complex financial problems will be essential to rebuilding our economy.
- Americans are not as divided as our politics makes us seem, and we can still come together to make life better for everyone
- I will listen to you, your problems will become my responsibility, and I will amplify your voices in Congress.
- Reducing maternal and fetal mortality
- Implementing clean energy solutions to climate change
- Protecting voting rights,
- Maintaining environmental protection laws to ensure clean air and clean water,
- Eliminating private prisons and any other financial incentives that lead to longer or more incarceration,
- Eliminating the school to prison pipeline,
- Eliminating racial bias in our justice system,
- Guaranteeing equal rights to all Americans without regard to gender, gender expression, gender identity or LGBTQ+ status,
- Preserving and strengthening our public education system so that our children have meaningful opportunities to build better lives,
- Making our immigration fairer and more compassionate, including providing a path to citizenship for DACA recipients and other longstanding undocumented members of our community, and prohibiting child separation at our borders,
- Legalizing marijuana as a racial justice issue,
- Addressing the opioid crisis and providing treatment options outside the criminal justice system,
- Addressing systemic racism,
- Reducing gun violence,
- Protecting and strengthening our federal safety nets,
- Protecting the rights of workers, including the right to unionize and collective bargaining rights, and making the economy fairer to workers generally, and
- Protecting a free press.
Brennan's decision for the majority in Sullivan v. New York Times is one of the most important free speech cases ever decided by the Court. A Commissioner of the city of Montgomery, Alabama, asserted that he had been libeled by a full-page advertisement in the New York Times in March 1960, describing the actions that had been taken to suppress the Civil Rights Movement in Montgomery and elsewhere in Alabama. Although some of the details in the advertisement were incorrect, the overall description was a fair depiction of the events transpiring at that time. Brennan, writing for the court, held that in the absence of actual malice, and in light of the immunity public officials generally have for their actions taken in the exercise of their duties, "It would give public servants an unjustified preference over the public they serve, if critics of official conduct did not have a fair equivalent of the immunity granted to the officials themselves. We conclude that such a privilege is required by the First and 14th Amendments."
We should elect leaders not merely based on whether we agree with them on the particular issues they have promised to address, but based on whether we trust them to do the right thing with respect to issues that we have not yet foreseen. When my husband Alex and I got married, we knew what we wanted our lives to look like, but we didn't know what challenges we would face. We trusted each other to find a way through whatever would come. With politicians, we often check boxes on policy more than on judgment. But we don't know what we will face. War, disease, economic collapse, famine, zombie apocalypse? Our elected officials should be those we trust to make good decisions in unanticipated catastrophes--and to have plans for every imaginable catastrophe so that they are ready if they need to be. Right now, as we struggle with the COVID-19 pandemic, some of our elected officials are rising to the occasion and making thoughtful decisions, while others are stumbling. We should elect the people with the skill set, the integrity and the judgment to lead.
I tend to credit others with more goodwill than perhaps they deserve, but remain careful to not give trust that has not been earned. I am calm--but not silent--in the face of provocation, and I lie awake at night trying to come up with solutions for any problem I have not yet solved. I try very hard to live in accordance with my principles, to engage in self-examination, to root out and account for my own biases, to seek out friends and colleagues who will challenge me rather than agree with me unreservedly, to rely on data and primary sources rather than secondary reporting, to know my own limits, and to always do what is right rather than what is expedient.
Also (and this is a very incomplete list): Larry Watson, Montana 1948; Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses; Toni Morrison, Beloved and Paradise; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, A Room of her Own and To the Lighthouse; Susan Minot, Evening; Charles Dickens, Bleak House; Ann Patchett, Bel Canto; Ursula K. LeGuin, A Wizard of Earthsea; Mildred D. Taylor, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; Anne McCaffrey, The Dragonriders of Pern; Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman; Alice McDermott, Child of my Heart; Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life; Michael Ondaatje, The Cat's Table; Gloria Naylor, Mama Day; and Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things.
Since mid-March, we have gone from a country with a robust economy and little unemployment--but too few well-paying jobs--to one in the grips of the worst financial crisis in a century. We already had challenges relating to income and wealth inequality, systemic racism, and lack of access to affordable healthcare and housing, among other issues. Too many Americans were living paycheck to paycheck, had food insecurity, lacked health insurance, and had limited prospects for a better future. That is now compounded by the collapse of the economy due to the COVID-19 pandemic, such that many who were thriving are now struggling, and those who were already struggling have fewer resources available to them.
We are also in the midst of a crisis of democracy, with voter suppression, gerrymandering, and judges selected for their ideology rather than their knowledge, sound judgment and neutrality. Politicians of both parties seem to work to increase the partisan divide rather than repairing it, and increasingly we seem to live in different realities, to such a degree that even our understanding of and response to the pandemic is driven by politics as much as science.
And we have been failing to address climate change for so long that we are running out of time. We must act quickly and decisively--and we must do so at a time when the economy is struggling and political distrust is at its height.
I think our rural communities generally have little confidence in Democrats, and I believe that serving on the Agriculture Committee would provide an important opportunity to advocate for their needs and change that dynamic. We need to be doing more for our farmers, including helping them manage debt loads and retain family land, protecting their land from pollution and environmental degradation, making sure that the commodities markets provide them with an opportunity to thrive, assisting with distribution channels, supporting rural hospitals and healthcare access, and ensuring that we have rural broadband everywhere that there is currently a gap. We also need to do a better job of protecting the food supply generally, making sure that our food gets to where it is needed, and recognizing that the current financial crisis has damaged or eliminated critical markets for locally grown produce and locally raised meat. Finally, I have worked for a decade with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which has become a key regulatory body and is overseen by the Agriculture Committee, so I can add significant value there.
That said, two years is what we have, and I will make maximum use of mine if I my district entrusts me with that responsibility.
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
See also
2020 Elections
External links
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Footnotes
