Who will replace Rick Quinn? Lexington voters decide Tuesday

Republican voters in District 69 will choose from five candidates in Tuesday’s GOP primary to represent them in the state House of Representatives.

The Lexington County seat was vacated in December, when former House Majority Leader Rep. Rick Quinn resigned and pleaded guilty to misconduct in office.

The accusations of illegal influence-pedaling against Quinn – amid other indictments of legislators in the four-year-old State House corruption probe – have District 69 voters evaluating candidates on more than the usual issues. Voters also are asking if they can trust the candidates with the powers of a state legislator.

Running to replace Quinn are: attorney and former legislative staffer Joel Deason; Lexington 1 school board member Anne Marie Eckstorm Green; small businessman and former hairdresser Alan Ray; attorney Michael Weaver; and fitness center owner Chris Wooten.

District 69 covers the northeastern section of Lexington County between Interstate 26 and Lake Murray, running from north of the Saluda River to Augusta Road and including eastern portions of the town of Lexington.

Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday. Because S.C. voters do not register by party, the primary is open to any registered voter – regardless of party – who lives in the district.

▪  Deason is running on his experience. An attorney with McCabe Trotter and Beverly, Deason is a former prosecutor with the Attorney General’s Office who previously worked at the State House as a research director for the state Senate. Now, he says he wants to use that inside knowledge of government to represent District 69.

“I’ve been involved in the nuts and bolts of how it really works,” Deason said of his six years as a legislative staffer. “I know what’s required to actually write legislation. I’ve handled hundreds or thousands of constituent cases.”

▪  Green, a member of the Lexington 1 school board since 2016, is focusing on education and local government issues.

She became active in the parent-teacher organization and school improvement council at her children’s schools before being elected to the school board in 2016. There, Green says she worked to shape South Carolina’s school food standards when new “healthy” federal regulations threatened to limit the snacks that had fueled the parent-teacher organization’s fundraising.

“I don’t know how ‘Republican’ and ‘education’ ever got separated,” she said. “If our focus is on jobs and economic development, we can’t do that without educating the workforce to fill those jobs.”

▪  Ray is a small business owner who calls himself the “former hairdresser for the powerful and influential.” Among the clients at his former salon was then-state Rep. Nikki Haley, the future governor who now is U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Ray, a former member of the state cosmetology board, worked on Haley’s campaigns. He later worked to get a “shampoo bill” passed through the Legislature to ease restrictions on which employees could wash a customer’s hair.

To distance himself from the existing system, Ray says he won’t take special interest money for his campaign and will donate his legislative salary to a domestic-violence charity. “People in Lexington County don’t trust what’s going on.”

▪  Weaver, an attorney with the McNair Law Firm in Columbia, says he, too, is fed up with the corruption.

Weaver first became involved with the Lexington County GOP after the county’s former sheriff, a Republican, was sent to prison for taking money to release two illegal immigrants from the county jail.

“I decided I can’t sit and hope it gets better,” he said. “I thought, ‘This is not me. This is not my party. I won’t let it go on like this.’

“I want to restore integrity to the State House.”

▪  Wooten is a former Marine and state trooper who moved to Lexington when he was assigned to one of the protective details that guard state officials. He now runs BodyShop Athletics.

Wooten said he decided to run because, “I got tired of going to the polls, and thinking, ‘Is this the best we have?’ ”

“I’d like to bring back Christian values, restore integrity and root out corruption, and I’d like to send a working man to represent the working people of Lexington,” Wooten said.

If none of the candidates wins a majority in Tuesday’s vote, the top two vote-getters will meet in a March 13 runoff.

The eventual GOP nominee will not face a challenge in the May 1 general election because a Libertarian candidate was denied his party’s nomination after he was sentenced to jail for threatening high school students.

This story was originally published February 25, 2018 at 9:22 PM with the headline "Who will replace Rick Quinn? Lexington voters decide Tuesday."