Days after killing himself, a vocal advocate for gun rights and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has won a New York primary election.
Assemblyman Bill Nojay was facing a fraud trial in Cambodia and reportedly under FBI scrutiny when he went to his family’s cemetery plot in Rochester and shot himself in front of an arriving police officer on Friday.
Now the defeat yesterday [Macau time] of challenger Richard Milne coupled with a quirk in state election law means that local GOP leaders, who encouraged voters to choose Nojay despite his death, get to pick someone to take on Democrat Barbara Baer in November. Nojay’s Republican-leaning district in the Legislature’s lower chamber covers parts of suburban Rochester and the Finger Lakes region.
“I really don’t know what to say. It’s such an unusual situation,” Milne told The Associated Press as unofficial results showed him trailing by nearly 1,000 of the 4,500 votes cast.
Though he hopes the three county leaders put him on the ballot, Milne was critical of “robocalls” and other efforts by the “powers that be” to boost Nojay after his death.
“They really did some things in the past few days that were in poor taste in my opinion to sway the vote,” he said.
While rare, posthumous elections happen, notably when Missouri Democratic Gov. Mel Carnahan died in a plane crash but defeated the Republican incumbent and future U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft in a 2000 Senate race. That victory led to the appointment of Carnahan’s widow, Jean Carnahan, to the Senate. Since 1962, four people who died close to Election Day have been elected to the House of Representatives.
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