Well… What happened next?

(Excerpt from Wikipedia:)

Tennessee state law required that the name of a candidate who died before the election be removed from the ballot, and it did not allow the candidate’s party to replace a deceased candidate who died within 30 days of the election. Accordingly, after Burks’s death, Looper became the only candidate listed on the official ballot for Burks’s senate seat.

Several people tried to have Looper’s name stricken from the ballot, claiming that Looper’s arrest constituted moral turpitude. The state Republican Party distanced itself from Looper. To prevent Looper from winning the state senate seat on a technicality, Burks’s widow, Charlotte was put forth as a write-in candidate for her husband’s seat. Dozens of volunteers helped her campaign, including some Republicans. On election day, Charlotte Burks, as a write-in candidate, won the seat with 30,252 votes (95.18%) against Looper’s 1,531 votes (4.82%). One of her first initiatives as state senator was to introduce legislation to ensure that the name of any candidate who dies within 40 days of an election could remain on the ballot, thus preventing the situation that occurred after her husband’s death. Charlotte Burks won re-election in 2002, 2006, and 2010. She retired after the 2014 election.

Yea… I read this and just WTF’ed at this. Imagine if the dude never got caught.

Like why run a campaign if you could just a little crime.

Also, dude was so stupid, could’ve hired an assassin instead of doing it himself.

(Also, if he were a former president instead, he would’ve been immune from the criminal prosecution. Rookie mistake.)

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_Looper#Assassination_of_Tommy_Burks

  • @andros_rexEnglish
    10•6 days ago

    Other political candidates and public personalities have emulated Looper’s adopted name or have independently adopted similar names. Among these were Something Awful founder Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, who adopted his nickname as a reference to Byron Looper, for whom Kyanka nearly worked as an intern in the summer of 1997.

    I didn’t realize Lowtax was named after him. I thought Something Awful leaned a bit more left in general, if just because of the ShitRedditSays connection.