The race to fill the South Carolina House seat vacated by former majority leader Rick Quinn will advance to a runoff election after no candidate received a majority of votes in this week’s special “Republican” primary.
Local businessman Chris Wooten received 1,408 votes – or 42.4 percent of the ballots cast – in Tuesday’s low turnout election, according to data from the S.C. Election Commission (SCVotes.org). Local school board member Anne Marie Eckstorm Green received 761 votes (or 22.9 percent of all ballots cast).
Attorney (and former S.C. State House staffer) Joel Deason finished in third place with 628 votes (18.9 percent) and attorney Michael Weaver came in fourth with 495 votes (14.9 percent).
Under South Carolina law, if no candidate receives a majority of votes in a partisan primary election the top two finishers advance to a runoff in two weeks time. That means Wooten and Green will go head-to-head, a winner-take-all battle that could get very interesting considering Green’s rumored connections to Quinn’s political network.
That election will be held on March 13.
Just three days later, though (on March 16), filing opens for the regular primary election for this seat (and the other 123 seats in the S.C. House of Representatives). Those elections – and partisan primaries for statewide offices – will be held on June 12.
In the meantime, though, our founding editor has reached out to both Wooten and Green in the hopes of getting them to submit a column laying out why voters should support their respective candidacies.
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