TUCSON — Voter turnout was 28 percent for the special primary election in Arizona’s 8th Congressional District.

Election results from the Secretary of State’s office shows less than 117,000 ballots were cast Tuesday in the district’s 352 precincts.

Voters in southern Arizona’s 8th Congressional District on Tuesday night chose Republican Jesse Kelly to face former Gabrielle Giffords aide Ron Barber in a special election to replace the wounded ex-congresswoman.

Barber and Kelly will face off in the special general election in June, but the two opponents have already started the war of words.

An appeals court upheld a requirement in a 2004 Arizona law that voters show identification before they can cast ballots, saying that there wasn’t evidence that the mandate disparately affected Latinos as the challengers had alleged.

Voters in southern Arizona’s 8th Congressional District are heading to the polls to choose who will face former Gabrielle Giffords aide Ron Barber in a special election to replace the wounded ex-congresswoman.

Former Arizona Democratic Party Chairman Andrei Cherny raised more money than his two opponents combined in the hotly contested Democratic primary for Arizona’s 9th Congressional District.

Cherny’s $431,000, which he raised in about seven weeks, dwarfed Sen. David Schapira’s $131,000 and left former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in a distant second place in the fundraising race with $258,000.

Ben Quayle topped fellow first-term Congressman David Schweikert in their first campaign finance reports of the year, but the candidates’ overall fundraising is still nearly even when it comes to money that can be spent in the Republican primary for Arizona’s 6th Congressional District.

Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu’s congressional campaign saw a marked decrease in fundraising after he faced allegations in mid-February that he threatened an ex-boyfriend with deportation, but he still raised more money during the quarter than his two Republican rivals in the race.

Following the historic recall of former Senate President Russell Pearce, the ousted immigration hawk’s legislative allies are striving to change the state’s recall process to make it more difficult to remove elected officials.

But the effort to add a primary election to the process has run into some obstacles.

Allegations of campaign law violations against Attorney General Tom Horne that were laid out in a complaint filed with the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office may only scratch the surface of the FBI’s investigation.

Most of the Republican hopefuls in Arizona’s 8th Congressional District started their campaigns with a lot of ground to make up and little time to do it.

When former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords announced her resignation in January, Jesse Kelly, the Republican nominee who narrowly lost to her in 2010, came in as the undisputed GOP frontrunner in the special election to replace her, and there aren’t any signs he has relinquished that mantle.