Charlie White and Tommy Schrader don’t appear to have much in common.

An attorney, White is a Republican accustomed to working in suit and tie. Schrader, a Democrat, doesn’t have a job and speaks to the media dressed in jeans and flannel shirts.

White raised more than $300,000 to run for Indiana secretary of state last year, winning far more votes than his Democratic opponent. His most visible ally is a nationally known member of the Republican National Committee who has represented clients in a number of campaign-related cases across the nation and in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Schrader spent no money running for a City Council nomination this spring and finished third – enough to win one of three slots on the fall ballot for City Council at large. His chief ally is a local businesswoman who rents out bicycles at Headwaters Park.

White has lived in and near the tony Indianapolis suburb of Fishers. Schrader has called at least two different local motels hotels his home in recent months.

What the Republican attorney and the Democrat who gets by on Social Security disability payments have in common are questions whether they were legal candidates when they ran. Those questions stem from another commonality: Political opponents have offered evidence that each didn’t meet state legal tests regarding where they lived.

Residency is a recurring and vexing political issue, one complicated by Indiana’s varying laws. Questions where candidates live and property they own don’t come up every year, and they are more often used as purely political arguments than legal challenges that rise to lawsuits, as in Schrader’s case, or criminal charges, such as those White faces.

Fortunately, state law addresses a number of circumstances, including candidates who have temporary homes, those with second homes and those working in Washington, D.C.

Unfortunately, many of those laws rest on a candidate’s intent.

Where candidates say they live or intend to live goes far, though opponents can offer documents and other evidence – as they are against Charlie White and Tommy Schrader – questioning their stated intent.

Adding to the confusion are the different rules for different offices. Candidates for the U.S. House, for example, can live anywhere in the state where they are seeking office, even outside the congressional district. Most other candidates have to live within the district of the office they seek – a specific council district, for example, or anywhere in the city for a city council at-large seat.

Consider some of the residency questions that have arisen – from highly public to inside political baseball discussions – over the past quarter-century:

Evan Bayh was criticized when he ran for Indiana secretary of state in 1986 because he had been working in Washington, and his candidacy for governor was formally challenged in 1988 because of the rule requiring governors to have lived in the state for the previous five years. Bayh prevailed, though, using the “Absence due to state or federal business” clause in the law.

Dan Coats is among

many candidates hit with the tag of “carpetbagger” for moving to the state or to a district shortly before an election. The term was first used to describe Northern politicians who moved South during the post-Civil War Reconstruction during a time when carpet bags were a practical form of luggage. Nearly 150 years later, the term is still often used.

Eric Doden isn’t the first resident of unincorporated Allen County to move into the city prior to a mayor’s race – former Sheriff Bud Meeks is among those who did so, before his 1983 mayor’s run.

Pat Love was indisputably an Allen County resident when she ran for county assessor in 2002 and pulled a surprise Democratic upset for the office long held by Republicans. But an obscure state law requires assessors also to own property in the county, and she was a renter. She complied by buying not a house but a small piece of vacant land.

Carol Coen lived in her electoral district when she successfully sought a fourth term for Fort Wayne Community Schools board in 2004 but later moved to another district. Though state law apparently allowed her to serve the rest of her term, she resigned – rightly – before the 2008 election.

Win Moses, Thomas Wyss and other state legislators have been criticized for owning homes in Marion County while representing the Fort Wayne area in the state legislature. But the law clearly allows such second homes, which are treated no differently from a lake cottage, for example. The beleaguered White, in a letter to Allen County Prosecutor Karen Richards, threatened to challenge Moses’ residency as well. Any such challenge would be futile.

Some questions about residency, particularly for candidates with multiple homes, can be simply answered: The candidate’s home is where he or she says it is intended to be and, as long as the politician doesn’t try to claim two places as the principal residence, will often prevail. But political opponents can dig for documents that contradict the politician’s stated intent.

In Indiana, one of the best pieces of evidence is the homestead exemption, which homeowners can receive only for their primary residence. That could well hurt White, who was registered to vote at his ex-wife’s address while maintaining a legal homestead at another.

Another good source of evidence comes in simple voting records, and Schrader’s attempts to remain on the City Council ballot for November face a huge obstacle because he voted in Wisconsin’s May primary even while running for office in Fort Wayne.

White, the buttoned-down GOP lawyer, and Schrader, the unemployed Democrat who had porn movies playing on his motel TV when interviewed by journalists, have something else in common: when their residencies were in question, both appeared to, in some ways, be transients.

Indiana law, among other elements, describes a candidate’s residence as “the person’s true, fixed, and permanent home” – which creates some questions when the candidate doesn’t seem to have one.