County Supervisor Shawn Nelson easily defeated Anaheim City Councilman Harry Sidhu on Tuesday for a four-year term on the county governing board.
As of Thursday morning, with all precincts reporting, Nelson had 62.9 percent of the vote and Sidhu 37.1 percent.
Nelson won a temporary spot on the five-member board in June when he bested Sidhu and Lorri Galloway, a member of the Anaheim City Council, for the supervisor seat that had been held by now-Assemblyman Chris Norby, R-Fullerton.
The chain-reaction series of elections was set off a year ago by former Assemblyman Mike Duvall, R-Yorba Linda, who resigned his seat after being caught on camera bragging about having sex with two women, one of them a utility industry lobbyist in Sacramento.
His boasts may not have been true, according to denials by one of the women, but his resignation set in motion a series of election contests that ended today.
When former county Supervisor Norby won the Assembly seat, he resigned his county post, creating, in effect, a double vacancy. Nelson, a lawyer and former Fullerton city councilman, won the right to immediately take office for the remainder of Norby’s term when he led the field in June. But he had to defeat Sidhu to win a four-year term.
Sidhu had more than $1 million behind him in June from the Orange County Employees Association, and the Association of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs, but he had little financial support this election after trailing Nelson substantially in the primary.
Once in office, Nelson created problems for himself, however. After campaigning heavily against government pensions, once he was in the supervisor’s chair, he opted to take for himself the most lucrative pension plan available.
After being hammered by his conservative backers and bloggers, he opted back out of that pension plan.