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Although you are correct about the runoff, it bears noticing that in the runoff, it appears that far fewer voted than in the special, and that Sanford himself received far fewer votes than he did previously.

This sounds like serious dissatisfaction, and maybe even a huge voter discouragement campaign, if someone were to ask me.

So, in reality, it can be argued that Sanford did NOT get anywhere 60% of the vote, given that in the previous election 19,000 was only 36% of the vote. That suggests that 11,000 is closer to 30% of the vote.

Can you spell trouble in River City...?

I would also say that someone very carefully split that special election vote into a fragmented mess. Intentional? My vote would be "yes".

2013 Republican Primary Runoff - South Carolina's 1st Congressional District Special Election^[28]
Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±%
	Republican	Mark Sanford	11,387	60.76	N/A
	Republican	Curtis Bostic	7,355	39.24	N/A

2013 Republican Primary - South Carolina's 1st Congressional District Special Election^[27]
Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±%
	Republican	Mark Sanford	19,854	36.91%	N/A
	Republican	Curtis Bostic	7,168	13.33%	N/A
	Republican	Larry Grooms	6,673	12.40%	N/A
	Republican	Teddy Turner	4,252	7.90%	N/A
	Republican	Andy Patrick	3,783	7.03%	N/A
	Republican	John Kuhn	3,479	6.47%	N/A
	Republican	Chip Limehouse	3,279	6.10%	N/A
	Republican	Ray Nash	2,508	4.66%	N/A
	Republican	Peter McCoy	867	1.61%	N/A
	Republican	Elizabeth Moffly	530	0.99%	N/A
	Republican	Tim Larkin	393	0.73%	N/A
	Republican	Jonathan Hoffman	360	0.67%	N/A
	Republican	Jeff King	211	0.39%	N/A
	Republican	Keith Blandford	195	0.36%	N/A
	Republican	Shawn Pinkston	154	0.29%	N/A
	Republican	Ric Bryant	87	0.16%	N/A

Yeah, the powers of the SC GOP set us up, again. Can we know the names of his handlers and donors? Who is Sanford going to owe going into his seat in congress? Hope breitbart finds that out.

xzins, you posted the district-wide results for the first round, but the run-off results you posted are only for the Charleston County portion of the district, which portion Sanford indeed won with over 60% but with “only” 11,387 votes in favor:
http://www.enr-scvotes.org/SC/Charleston/46117/116028/en/summary.html

In the entire SC-01 (which also includes precincts in four other counties), Sanford won the run-off with 56.6%, with over 26,000 votes cast in his favor. http://www.enr-scvotes.org/SC/46107/116029/en/summary.html

So while there was a drop-off in the total turnout from the first round to the run-off—as is typical of run-offs, particularly when 14 candidates were eliminated after the first round—it wasn’t anywhere close to what you believed.

As for the fact that 16 candidates ran in the first round, that was only because 15 candidates believed they could finish in the top-two and have a chance of beating Sanford in the run-off. Believe me, they weren’t Sanford patsies; and even had they been Sanford patsies, Sanford faced only one candidate in the run-off, and beat him one-on-one with 56.6%.