John Cox Pays $1257.38 Per Vote in South Carolina

In what is surely a sign that he should be packing it in and heading back to Chicago (if he hasn’t already) fringe Republican candidate for president John Cox received just 83 votes in the South Carolina Primary on Jan. 19, according to the official results.

Bear in mind, former candidate Tom Tancredo was able to pull out 121 votes EVEN AFTER LEAVING THE RACE. Another vanity candidate, Hugh Cort, beat Cox by getting 88 votes. But Cox beat Cap Fendig, a county commissioner from Georgia who got 23 votes.

Uh... Congratulations?

Final expenditures for South Carolina, reported in Cox’s end-of-year FEC report, show that he spent $104,362.90 there. Meaning that each vote cost over $1257.

That’s worse than in New Hampshire, where he cut his campaign short late last year and closed up his long-vacant office. He spent $44,271.05 in the Granite State, and got 40 votes for his trouble - or $1,107 per vote.

Iowa’s expenditure of $101,183 went entirely to waste, since there is no evidence that he received ANY votes in the Iowa Caucus. It’s believed that Iowa GOP officials didn’t even bother to list Cox on the ballot, assuming correctly that he had no support, given his last place finish in the Straw Poll earlier that year (41 votes, or one tenth of one percent.)

Cox has now spent just over a million dollars on his campaign since he started running in Feb. 2006. He’s raised only $22K from gullible voters in that same time.

The final tally of the Cox campaign:
Total cash on hand, 12/31/07: $1.,654.27
Total donations, 10/1-12/31/07: $226 (sic) two hundred twenty-six bucks
Loaned from candidate in that period: $30,000
Total loaned to himself since 2/8/2006: $1,055,000
Total spent on his campaign: $1,080,124
Total in Iowa: $101,182
Total in NH: $44,271
Total in SC: $104,363

Biggest disbursements in last period of 2007:
$1,500 to a PR firm in Chicago, IL (can anyone resurrect this guy's image at this point?)
$281 to an ice company in Iowa for.. ice, on 10/31/07 (if was dry ice, maybe it was for a haunted house? Surely not a victory party.)

Oddest disbursement:
A donation of $500 by Cox to "Aging Citizens, Inc." on 10/30/07. Googling this group shows zero results, an the location was not revealed on FEC reports, which is bound to land Cox with yet another warning letter from the federal agency seeking more information, and perhaps an investigation as to why his meager fundraising dollars are being wasted on donations to (what one would hope are) a non-profit group.