As we approach midnight, our Orange County Registrar of Voters claimed that in four hours he was only able to tabulate 2.7 percent of today's election votes and, because of that incompetence, I'm slightly pissed that I missed most of NBC's “Love in the Wild.”
Yet, I will go to sleep with a satisfied smile on my face because wise Fullerton voters have booted three smug city councilmen–Dick Jones, Don Bankhead and Pat McKinley–who thought they could ignore valid community outrage about the unnecessary police killing of an unarmed, homeless Kelly Thomas in July 2011.
]
During a post-midnight victory celebration, recall leader Chris Thompson said to Ron Thomas, “Thank you for how you allowed us to bring some benefit to the community from your murdered son.”
Other likely winners tonight include: Loretta Sanchez, Todd Spitzer, Janet Nguyen, Allan R. Mansoor, Tom Daly, Chris Norby, John Campbell and Ed Royce.
The ambitious Spitzer, who romped over Deborah Pauly with nearly 70 percent of the vote, returns to power on the county's board of supervisors after his 2010 firing as a senior prosecutor in the Orange County District Attorney's office.
Fred Karger, the nation's first openly gay major party presidential candidate, won an upset of sorts. The Laguna Beach resident and former Ronald Reagan campaign adviser wasn't a threat to Mitt Romney but nonetheless won more votes (6,482 to 5,244) in California than Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party's presidential candidate. Johnson captured just one vote more than Karger in Orange County. Johnson's running mate is former OC Superior Court Judge Jim Gray.
Occupy Orange County's D'Marie Mulattieri transferred her passion from protests to the electoral process in hopes of challenging Royce in the state's 39th Congressional District, but garnered only 3.7 percent of the vote.
The election didn't motivate many citizens. Less than 20 percent of registered voters in the county cast ballots. Republicans produced the best turnout with more than 25 percent of their voters participating, according to the registrar's numbers.
(Brandon Ferguson contributed to this report.)
Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.