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 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, South Dakota voters in the 15th state legislative district elected Jenna Haggar to the House.  She is a registered independent, and is only 24 years old.  She defeated an incumbent Democratic state representative.  Each South Dakota legislative district elects two house members, every two years.  In the 15th district in 2010, there were no Republicans running, just two Democrats and one independent.

Haggar is the first independent elected to the South Dakota house since 1994, although South Dakota voters had elected an independent to the State Senate in 2008.  However, the State Senate independent elected in 2008, Tom Dempster, was actually a registered Republican who had accidentally failed to qualify for his party’s primary ballot, so he had then petitioned as an independent.