who calls a special election to fill a vacancy in the senate
List of special elections to the United States Senate The Seventeenth Amendment now requires the governor of the state to issue a writ for a special election to fill a vacant Senate seat, but no timeframe is specified in the provision for when the special election is to be held. State legislatures may also empower the governor to fill a vacancy by a temporary appointment, until the winner of the special election is certified. The constitution does not set out how the temporary appointee is to be selected (eg., there is no federal requirement that the appointee be of the same party, as happened most recently in New Jersey in 2013), and the state legislature can legislate as to how the replacement is to be selected.