Louis Belcher
American mayor
Louis D. Belcher (born 1939) is an American politician who served as the mayor of Ann Arbor, Michigan, from 1978 to 1985. He won office in an unusual "special election" of 1978, held after lengthy court wranglings over the disputed 1977 mayoral contest, and went on to win three more two-year terms as mayor.
Early career
Louis Belcher was born in 1939. In 1971, Belcher first ran for mayor of Ann Arbor, losing in the Republican primary to Jack J. Garris, who was then defeated in the general election by Democrat Robert J. Harris.
Contested election of 1977
In 1978, normally not a mayoral election year in Ann Arbor, Belcher became mayor under unusual circumstances. In April 1977, he had run as the Republican nominee against incumbent Democratic mayor Albert H. Wheeler, the city's first African-American mayor. Belcher lost by a margin of a single vote, with Wheeler prevailing by a count of 10,660 to 10,659. The election results, however, went to court because twenty people who lived just outside city limits had voted, without knowing that they were ineligible to cast ballots in Ann Arbor. A judge ordered that the voters reveal the name of the candidate for whom they had voted, in order to determine who would have won the election without the twenty ineligible votes. Two of the first five voters who were called to testify how they voted refused to do so, citing the secrecy of the ballot.
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This entry incorporates text from “Louis Belcher” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.