More than a third of the state’s legislative positions have already been decided before Oklahoma voters cast their ballots in the June 18 primary. Uncontested elections are a trend across the country, especially in Republican-led states.
50 of 127 They already have seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate, accounting for 40% of the votes. Oklahoma state elections this year.
And it’s too late now to oppose a candidate running unopposed in your district: the official candidate registration period ended in early April.
Oklahoma is not the only state where candidates for office, or people looking to keep their elected positions, are running uncontested, according to an analysis by Ballotpedia, a national election-tracking nonprofit.
Ballotpedia has tracked 242 state and local elections in Oklahoma to date, and 53 of them, or 22%, were uncontested, according to the nonprofit’s analysis. Other states with a similar number of elections have seen even fewer candidates face competitive challenges.
In West Virginia, 76 percent of the 258 races tracked had one candidate. In Nebraska, Ballotpedia analysts looked at 137 races and found that 71.7 percent were uncontested. In Texas, Ballotpedia analysts tracked 1,333 races and found that 69 percent were uncontested.
Nationwide, the nonprofit tracked about 20,000 elections in 47 states through May, with 72 percent of them uncontested. Oklahoma has so far looked to be a tighter race than most other states in this year’s election.
Yet only one person wants to win any election, and constituencies of a certain size cannot choose their own representatives.
In Oklahoma’s House and Senate districts, roughly 40,000 to 80,000 voters per district will not be voting in November to represent their state-level representatives.
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