ROBERT STEINBUCH: Know your Friends |
Statewide, there will be a runoff election on March 31 for those primary (partisan) elections where no candidate won over 50 percent of the vote last week. (The runoff election for judicial contests, which are nominally non-partisan, will be during the general election in November.)
Nine of the 11 candidates that I supported in this column won outright or made it to a runoff. Two of the nine are in runoff elections: Richard Friend, who's running for Saline County sheriff, and Scott Davidson, who's running for Circuit Court judge in Independence, Cleburne, Izard, Fulton, and Stone counties.
As to the former, two weeks before early voting, online posts circulated alleging that Friend was a domestic abuser. They were lies.
These allegations stem from Friend's decades-old divorce, which he filed for in 2012. At that time, Friend's now ex-wife sought an order of protection.
The process of getting such an order begins with the complainant filing a request "ex parte," i.e., without the other side present. The court, relying solely on the one party's bare assertions, usually grants that request only temporarily and quickly schedules a hearing so that the other side can be heard. Then the petitioner must serve that temporary order on the other side who was not before the court. And that initial order typically instructs both sides not to contact each other, as was the case here.
When Friend got a copy of the ex-parte, temporary order, he followed its instructions and didn't contact his then-wife. But she contacted him numerous times, notwithstanding that it was she who sought the order. The transcript of Friend's then-wife's testimony from........