Last week, the voters of Portland, Maine, passed a charter revision to hold Mayoral elections, using Instant Runoff Voting. The first such election will be in November 2011. See this story.
The current system does not provide for a popular election for Mayor. Instead, the voters choose members of the City Council, and the City Council chooses one of its own members to hold the office of Mayor.
West Virginia State Senator Earl Tomblin is scheduled to become acting Governor of West Virginia as soon as Governor Joe Manchin resigns to become a U.S. Senator. This story covers a press conference held by Senator Tomblin. He has no plans to ask the legislature to pass a bill providing for a special gubernatorial election, but says if there is a public desire for such a special election, then he would support that idea.
West Virginia does not elect a Lieutenant Governor, and the State Constitution says the President of the State Senate becomes Governor when the Governor leaves office in the middle of a gubernatorial term. The Constitution says a special election should be held to fill a vacant gubernatorial seat if there is more than one year to go in the term, but does not say when the special election should be held.
Senator Tomblin says he will remain a State Senator, but he will not vote in the State Senate.
Last week, the voters of Kentucky’s State Senate district 2, centered on Paducah, re-elected independent State Senator Bob Leeper. Leeper was first elected to the State Senate in 1990 as a Democrat, and re-elected as as Democrat in 1994 and 1998. However, then he became a Republican and won as a Republican in 2002. Then, he became an independent and was re-elected as an independent in 2006, and now he has again won re-election as an independent.
Many of his election races have been close. This year he won a 3-person race with 46.3% of the vote. His Democratic opponent, Rex Smith, received 43.8%, and his Republican opponent, William East, received 10.0%. The 2006 election had been even closer: he received 41.1%; his Democratic opponent, Carroll Hubbard, received 40.9%; his Republican opponent, Neil Archer, received 18.0%.
Leeper is chair of the Senate Budget Committee.
Last week, the voters of Tennessee’s 4th state house district re-elected Kent Williams as an independent candidate. He is the first person to win an election to the Tennessee legislature as an independent since 1982. He had been re-elected as a Republican in 2008. But in early 2009, when the state house was virtually tied, all the Democrats in the House had voted for Williams to be Speaker. With the votes of all the Democrats, and his own vote, Williams was elected Speaker, but then he was expelled from the Republican Party, so in 2010 he ran for re-election as an independent.
Williams says he still identifies as a Republican. After he was expelled from the party, he listed himself as a member of the “Carter County Republican Party” on the legislature’s roster, but of course there is no such ballot-qualified party.
Williams will no longer be speaker, because in 2010 the Republican Party won a large majority in both houses of the legislature.
Tennessee had also had an independent State Senator in 2008, but, unlike Williams, he was never elected as an independent. He had been elected as a Republican in 2004, to a four-year term, and then had become an independent in 2007. But when he tried to be re-elected as an independent in 2008, he was narrowly defeated.
Last week, Rusty Kidd, Georgia’s only independent state legislator, was re-elected. He faced one opponent, a Democrat. Kidd won 57.3%-42.7%. Kidd was the only independent who was able to qualify for either house of the Georgia legislature by petition this year.
On November 5, Kidd was hospitalized because a small bone in his neck was broken, but he is expected to be back at work well before the session opens. He has been in a wheelchair for the past decade because of a past motorcycle accident.
Kidd is the son of Senator Culver Kidd, who is no longer living. Senator Kidd was the author of the 1986 Georgia ballot access reform bill that lowered the statewide petitions from 2.5% of the number of registered voters, to 1%, and also provided that parties that poll at least 1% of the number of registered voters for any statewide race are ballot-qualified for all statewide offices. It is because of Senator Kidd’s 1986 bill that the Georgia Libertarian Party has been on the ballot for the statewide offices, with no petitioning needed (except for the party’s initial petition in 1988), for over twenty years.
