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You may not have heard of Joe Shammas, but he ran for Congress this spring in the Valley's 29th district and 10,847 people voted for him. Perhaps the only thing more surprising than that is that 12,397 other people voted for Richard Alarcon, the former state lawmaker and City Council member, who appears to have run solely to celebrate the voiding of his perjury conviction and to tweak Rep. Tony Cardenas, a longtime rival.
Cardenas finished first with 58,616 votes, or 61.4 percent. As you can tell from the vote totals above, Alarcon finished second (with 13.0 percent), so he gets to be on the ballot in November to lose to Cardenas. But Secretary of State Alex Padilla, who hails from the same corner of the Valley as all these other folks, mistakenly issued a certificate to Shammas certifying that he finished second and would be on the ballot.
Oops. Now Shammas is mad.
From Dakota Smith on the Daily News politics blog:
On Monday afternoon, a Secretary of State spokesman told the Daily News that Shammas’ certificate was issued in error.
Told of the news, Shammas said, “It makes me feel horrible. I don’t understand how they could do this.”The excited Shammas last week re-activated his campaign and website after getting the certificate, he said. He also complained that he called the Secretary of State’s office about the certificate, but “they were very evasive and could not explain.”
Certified results posted on the Secretary of State’s web site show Cardenas and former City Councilman Richard Alarcon were the top two vote getters in the June 7 election, with 61.4 percent and 13 percent, respectively. Shammas came in third with 11.3 percent. Candidates Benny Bernal and David Guzman came in fourth and fifth.
By the way, the only blogger posting less often than me these days is...Dakota Smith. The last previous post on the Daily News' Sausage Factory blog was June 8. Of course, she has a day job writing stories for the actual Daily News.
The Sausage Factory is the politics blog started by the late Rick Orlov and has been only sporadically active since his death in February 2015.
