The OC Weekly warned about his election in an article back in January 2018 article, "Steve Rocco, Andy Kaufman's Living Ghost, Wants to be OC's Next Clerk-Recorder"
"Steve Rocco has filed paperwork to become Orange County’s next Clerk-Recorder. Rocco, in case you’ve forgotten, is the mystery man who in 2004 became a trustee of the Orange Unified School District (OUSD) when voters chose him over a teachers’-union-backed candidate. Calling himself an “educator,” Rocco, an eccentric frequenter of swap meets who many believe to be the living ghost of performance artist Andy Kaufman and apparently briefly worked as a substitute teacher decades ago, attracted international media attention when he showed up for meetings wearing a black beanie and dark sunglasses and began publicly ranting about how Kodak, Albertsons and Smokecraft Sausage secretly control Orange County’s government in a scheme he called “The Partnership.”
Despite that alluring, non-teachers’-union-endorsed platform, Rocco’s subsequent political ambitions, both at OUSD and beyond, didn’t exactly pan out. In a 2005 press conference, Rocco declared that the Partnership hired a man to assassinate him (Links to an external site.). Four years later, in the most gloriously comical waste of taxpayer money in county history, prosecutors took Rocco to trial after a Chapman University security guard caught him red-handed in the act of stealing a half-empty, room-temperature, plastic bottle of ketchup from a school eating area. Longtime Rocco nemesis Fred Smoller, a Chapman professor Rocco had been stalking when he was busted, described the trial as “a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty,” with apologies to the Woody Allen film Bananas.
In 2018, Rocco got 107,926 votes for Orange County Clerk-Recorder.
In 2022, Steve Rocco is again running for Orange County Clerk-Recorder. How many votes will he get this time?
Here are a few resources to help your research
The League of Women Voters of California (cavotes.org)
You can also search local media archives for candidates:
Low information elections - where the voter doesn't know what the office is or who they might be voting for can lead to some very interesting (and scary) outcomes.
If you haven't done your research or know anything about the candidates for a particular race, you can leave it blank instead of voting for someone who might be unqualified, corrupt, or simply unfit to hold the office. Unfortunately, voters feel obligated to fill in every box and vote based on other factors (first name on the ballot, for the ballot designation).
Remember Judge Ronald Klein?
Judge Ronald Kline was up for re-election in 2002 for the Superior Court of Orange County. As often occurs with judges, he was running unopposed as most incumbent judges win their races. However, Kline turned himself over to federal authorities on Nov. 9, two days after the election filing deadline. The federal indictment charging him with six counts of possessing child pornography says investigators found more than 100 images of child pornography on a computer hard drive, computer disks and a commercial videotape in his home. Pornography was later found on his work computer.
The search came after a hacker broke into one of Judge Kline's computers and sent the information to an Internet pedophile watchdog group, which tipped the authorities.
Also found, according to the indictment, was an electronic diary in which the judge wrote of ogling young men at a local gym and swimming pool. The diary also suggested that he used his position as a Little League umpire to watch young boys.
After the case was reported in the Los Angeles Times and Orange County Register, a number of men accused Kline of trading sex for reduced sentences as he presided over juvenile court.
The media got involved - people were outraged and 11 write-in candidates emerged to try to keep him from winning. Either with all of this attention and media coverage, Kline got 33% of the vote. Write-in Candidate John Adams won his seat and continues to serve as a Judge for the Orange County Superior Cour
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