1977 Mayoral Election and 1978 "special Election"
In 1977, Wheeler ran for reelection, facing Republican challenger Louis D. Belcher. Wheeler won the election by a margin of a single vote, prevailing by a count of just 10,660 to 10,659. The election results, however, were challenged in court because twenty people who lived just outside city limits had voted without knowing that they were ineligible to cast ballots in Ann Arbor. A judge ordered that the voters reveal the name of the candidate for whom they had voted, in order to determine who would have won the election without the twenty ineligible votes, but University of Michigan student Susan R. Van Hattum refused the order on privacy grounds.
As the court challenge dragged on through 1977, Mayor Wheeler agreed to a new citywide vote—in effect, a "re-do" of the contested election—in order to end the contentious legal process. Belcher agreed, and the new election was held in 1978. This time, Belcher triumphed, ousting Wheeler from office and becoming mayor.
Read more about this topic: Albert H. Wheeler
Famous quotes containing the words election and/or special:
“He hung out of the window a long while looking up and down the street. The world’s second metropolis. In the brick houses and the dingy lamplight and the voices of a group of boys kidding and quarreling on the steps of a house opposite, in the regular firm tread of a policeman, he felt a marching like soldiers, like a sidewheeler going up the Hudson under the Palisades, like an election parade, through long streets towards something tall white full of colonnades and stately. Metropolis.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Fashions change, and with the new psychoanalytical perspective of the postwar period [WWII], child rearing became enshrined as the special responsibility of mothers ... any shortcoming in adult life was now seen as rooted in the failure of mothering during childhood.”
—Sylvia Ann Hewitt (20th century)