Posted on 03/13/2008 7:55:23 AM PDT by SmithL
Crossover voting in Tuesday's primary elections figured prominently in the races for the 1st District congressional seat -- in both parties.
Unofficial returns from both Democratic and Republican primaries indicate April 1 runoff elections will be needed for the 1st District party nominees.
And those who crossed over in Tuesday's voting must vote in the same party for the runoff, election officials said Wednesday.
In the Democratic Party primary, Travis Childers, Chancery Court clerk in Prentiss County, will face state Rep. Steve Holland of Plantersville.
In the Republican Party primary runoff, former Tupelo mayor Glenn McCullough Jr. will face Southaven Mayor Greg Davis.
Outcomes in both party primaries likely were shaped by the crossover vote -- voters from one party opting to vote in the other party's primary.
"The crossover vote played a role in the 1st and 3rd district races," said Marty Wiseman, executive director of the Stennis Institute at Mississippi State University.
"Nearly 500,000 people voted in the Democratic primary, and that sucked up a lot of independent voters who might have gone with the Republicans in the First or Third District."
Undoubtedly, that was a factor in DeSoto County.
"It cost us several hundred votes, yes," said Chris Wilson, chairman of the DeSoto County Republican Party Executive Committee, who was working hard for the Davis campaign.
Samuel Williams, DeSoto County chairman for the Democratic Party, said the crossovers "gave us a bunch of votes. It could have been several thousand.
"I believe we got more Democratic Party votes (Tuesday) than for any race here I can remember, certainly more than for any primary."
The attraction for Republicans to vote in the Democratic Party primary was that voters could express themselves on the candidacies of Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The Republican party presidential nomination has already been settled by Sen. John McCain.
But while the main shift Tuesday was from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party, some Democratic voters opted to vote in the GOP election so they could vote for Davis, McCullough or Dr. Randy Russell of Oxford.
McCullough, who received 39 percent of the vote, and Davis, who received 37 percent, are headed to a runoff since neither received more than 50 percent of the vote. Russell came in third with 24 percent.
With the runoff just three weeks away, Davis, 42, and McCullough, 53, were both back on the campaign trail Wednesday.
"We're out knocking on doors and making phone calls and thanking all the folks for their support," Davis said.
Meanwhile, Russell, 54, was preparing to endorse McCullough in the runoff race.
Today, at a press conference at the Hampton Inn in Oxford, Russell said he plans to announce his support for McCullough.
"Glenn shares our same political philosophy," Russell said.
Davis responded, "Dr. Russell has the right to support whoever he wants. I just think the voters of the 1st District are smart enough to make up their own minds."
Unofficial returns from the state Republican Party showed that Davis ran first in DeSoto, Tate, Panola, Marshall and Benton counties; Russell carried his home county of Lafayette; and McCullough was top vote-getter in 17 counties. The candidates split the vote evenly in one county.
A county-by-county breakdown on the Democratic side was not available from state party headquarters.
Crossover voting may have occurred in other counties of the district, but no county would have had the number of crossover votes that DeSoto had.
Impact? Davis was getting a steady 70 percent of the vote in the Republican Party primary in DeSoto County. If 3,000 Republicans crossed over, the likely loss to Davis in the county would have been about 2,100 votes -- enough to put him ahead of McCullough, but not enough to avoid a runoff.
"The problem with the crossovers is that those are votes that are lost," said Chris Wilson. "Once they crossed over, they're locked in. In the runoff election, those who crossed over will only be allowed to vote in the same party runoff" where they cast the original primary vote.
Danny Klein, a member of the DeSoto County Election Commission, said there is no restraint on voters who did not vote in the primary.
"In the runoff election, (people who didn't vote Tuesday) may vote in either party's election, regardless of how they may have voted in past elections."
The runoff winners will represent their parties in the Nov. 4 general election for a congressman to take office in January.
Candidates are also gearing up for a nonpartisan special election April 22, which will be held to fill the remaining months on former Rep. Roger Wicker's current term until it expires in January. Wicker was appointed to the Senate after Trent Lott retired in December.
Russell said since he lost in the primary he is bowing out of the special election.
But his name will still appear on the special election ballot. The other candidates who qualified for the special election are Davis, McCullough, Childers and Holland.
Independent candidate Wally Pang of Batesville and Green Party candidate John M. Wages Jr. of Tupelo also will be on special election ballot.
Complete, unofficial returns from Tuesday's party primaries in Mississippi:
President, Democrat
(1,912 of 1,912 precincts)
x-Barack Obama: 255,809, 61 percent
Hillary Clinton: 155,686, 37 percent
John Edwards: 3,894, 1 percent
Joe Biden: 1,784, 0 percent
Bill Richardson: 1,365, 0 percent
Dennis Kucinich: 895, 0 percent
Chris Dodd: 731, 0 percent
Mike Gravel: 587, 0 percent
(x-winner)
President, Republican
(1,912 of 1,912 precincts)
x-John McCain: 113,074, 79 percent
Mike Huckabee: 17,943, 13 percent
Ron Paul: 5,510, 4 percent
Mitt Romney: 2,177, 2 percent
Fred Thompson: 2,160, 2 percent
Rudy Giuliani: 945, 1 percent
Alan Keyes: 842, 1 percent
Duncan Hunter: 414, 0 percent
Tom Tancredo: 221, 0 percent
(x-winner)
U.S. Senate, Democrat
(1,912 of 1,912 precincts)
x-Erik Fleming: 228,115, 66 percent
Shawn O'Hara: 119,506, 34 percent
(x-winner)
U.S. House Dist. 1, Democrat
(462 of 462 precincts)
r-Travis Childers: 39,917, 42 percent
r-Steve Holland: 29,602, 31 percent
Marshall Coleman: 12,567, 13 percent
Brian H. Neely: 10,171, 11 percent
Ken Hurt: 3,914, 4 percent
(r-advances to runoff)
U.S. House Dist., 1 GOP
(462 of 462 precincts)
r-Glenn McCullough: 17,082, 39 percent
r-Greg Davis: 16,161, 37 percent
Randy Russell: 10,688, 24 percent
The crossover voting issue has not gotten the proper attention it deserves in this debate about Michigan and Florida revotes. If you are an Obama supporter, but voted for McCain in the GOP primary because you were told that the Dem primary would not count, can you vote in the revote?
Fairness to Obama says “yes.”
I had to sign for a GOP ballot in Michigan so there is a record and democrats who crossed the line “shouldn’t” be able to cross back to vote for a democrat in the event of a revote.
Crossover voting is absolutely the biggest scam going. It makes our elections look worse than third-world nations. Even the Iraqis had the common sense to have folks dip their finger in purple ink.
Here in Anchorage, the dems and GOP had their caucuses on the same day. There were so many dems doing the one-day-flip that the GOP caucus location ran out of registration forms. Later on a dem friend told me he and his dem buddies intentionally filed GOP at the polling place, voted for Ron Paul (duh), then went up the street, flipped back and voted dem at the dem caucus. It was a total scam, and partially explains the unusually high RP numbers he got here.
I think if folks switch or declare party affiliation, it should be locked in for a year or the next election, whichever comes first.
Personally, I think they should be able to do it. If there are revotes in these states, then Hillary is the nominee unless perchance the Dems who voted in the GOP primary because the Dem primary did not count are allowed to revote.
Once you change the rules in the middle of the game, you’ve got to make allowances for the unfairness caused by your original rule.
Obama needs to press the DNC on that issue. Otherwise, he’s pretty much handing the nomination over to Hillary.
The big problem, though, is that you don’t know which of the crossover GOP voters are there because they truly support the Dem, and which are there because they just want to vote for the weakest Dem.
Interesting.
Something like that should be illegal.
It’s illegal to vote vote twice (although that doesn’t stop the Democrats from trying) and anyone who does it should be severely fined.
>> Crossover voting is absolutely the biggest scam going. It makes our elections look worse than third-world nations. Even the Iraqis had the common sense to have folks dip their finger in purple ink.
That’s an ignorant statement, start to finish.
You have one vote; you can use it however you please. You want to vote for someone in “your” party, fine. You want to cross over and vote for someone in “the other” party, that’s fine too.
As long as you vote only once, no problem. Crossing over does not make us “worse than a third world nation”. That’s just a stupid comment.
“Purple fingers” had nothing to do with “crossing over”. It was to prevent voting more than once.
We don’t have to declare that we are member of a party in Tennessee. We always check which primary we want to vote in during the primary elections. Are they going to compare every person who votes in the run-off to their ballot signature form from the last election? How can they logistically do that? Have they had time to key the primary every voter chose into the computer? What if they made a mistake? How would you convince them they made a mistake whilst signing in for the run-off election? Insist they retrieve the ballot signature sheets out of the lock box in storage? Fat chance that would happen on election day. I guess you would be given a provisional ballot and they would check it later.
it’s no big deal during a primary..come on. For one thing, primaries are nominations...not votes for an election. I remain a registered democrat, because my state is incredibly left wing...and it’s the only way to stop the true whack jobs from getting nominated. The only true votes that count are in the GE.
I though my post made it pretty clear that's exactly what the dims did; they voted as a repub, went up the street, re-registered as dem, and voted again as a dem.
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