As my colleague Charlie Martin observed, rather pithily, "Hey, dead people vote; they deserve representation too."
My response to that is: Why encourage it?
Bruce Giudici, a 68-year-old CFO from Calaveras County in California, was running hard for county supervisor, an office he had been pursuing for several years. On August 30, he was out knocking on doors when he collapsed and died a few hours later. With the election so close, there was no time to remove his name from the ballot.
On Tuesday evening, election officials released the latest tranche of counted ballots, and Giudici appeared to have an insurmountable lead. He held 57% of the vote against his opponent, with just 500 votes yet to be counted. That gives him a 497-vote lead over his opponent, Clyde Clapp.
The people of Calaveras County have apparently elected a dead guy. Mark Twain would have loved it.
His campaign website paid tribute to his character.
"Bruce was beloved by many. His passing has been met with an overwhelming outpouring of sympathy for his family, community, co-workers, and the organizations he supported through tireless dedication over the years."
The man was certainly involved in the community.
Throughout his career, he applied his financial and organizational skills to various organizations and non-profits, including Catholic Charities, the Stockton Homeless Shelter, public education initiatives, Heald Business College, MACT Health, San Joaquin Head Start, and the Amador Tuolumne Community Action Agency.
In addition to his career in finance, he was deeply committed to community service and activism. He notably founded and ran the Valley Food Coalition out of a passion for food security, and was heavily involved in organizing local events like the Stockton and Calaveras County Earth Day festivals. He was also a talented musician who played the trombone in a variety of local jazz, concert, and big bands.
“Bruce Giudici stood for fiscal responsibility, ethical leadership and putting people first,” his campaign wrote in a social media post last month. “Let’s honor his vision by voting BRUCE Nov. 3 and allowing the appointment process to find a similarly qualified District 5 resident to serve our community.”
The appointment process includes the governor appointing a temporary supervisor at the end of the current supervisor's term in January. The temporary supervisor will serve until an election can be held, probably in 2028.
Bruce Giudici fell while he was door knocking and died. He is beating his opponent 57 - 43! amp.sacbee.com/news/califor...
— Michael McLean (@michaelmclean.me) November 11, 2026 at 11:12 AM
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The situation became very weird when the Giudici campaign workers decided to make the argument that voting for a dead guy was better than voting for his opponent.
In this race, it resulted in the macabrely comical argument on the part of Giudici’s campaign that voters were better off voting for a dead candidate than they were voting for Clyde Clapp, who they painted as angry and incompetent, among other things. The official website for Giudici’s campaign contains a laundry list of accusations and citations against Clapp; everything from calling him out for failing to respond to queries from locals, to alleging that he owned properties deemed to be dangerous health hazards, to court records saying that Clapp had violated a court order in the 1990s to seek anger management counseling. It’s some classic small-town political mudslinging.
Again, I can't stop thinking of what the great humorist would have made of this. His classic short story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," featured several 19th-century literary devices that Twain employed expertly, making the "Jumping Frog" an extraordinary example of how art mirrors life. It proves that whether in a fictional California mining camp or a real-world local election, truth is always stranger, and funnier, than fiction