WHY YOU KNOW HIM: The former software engineer, teacher, lawyer and new media entrepreneur from Northern Virginia was the Libertarian candidate for governor. On Election Day, he got 6.5 percent of the vote.

Sarvis, who ran his campaign on a shoestring, sought to achieve the 10 percent threshold that would give Libertarians automatic placement on future ballots. Polls showed many voters turning to Sarvis as an alternative a dynamic that some suggested adversely affected Republican Ken Cuccinellis chances.

But Sarvis refuses to accept responsibility for the GOPs defeat.

The Republican Party has an amazing ability to always find someone other than themselves to blame for their defeats, he said. Their response to this election is actually kind of emblematic of their politics, where prior beliefs trump evidence whenever the two conflict.

Sarvis was the first gubernatorial candidate for the Libertarian Party of Virginia since 2001, when William Redpath received just 14,500 votes, or 0.8 percent.

A former Republican, Sarvis first threw his hat into the political arena two years ago as the GOP candidate against Richard L. Saslaw, the Democratic leader in the Virginia Senate. Sarvis lost with 37 percent of the vote.

The Fairfax County native has since joined the Libertarian Party and in 2013 ran on a platform of limited government, fiscal responsibility and social liberalism.

Sarvis, who is half Chinese and is married to a black woman, supports legalizing same-sex marriage. He has compared the struggle of gay and lesbian couples to have their unions recognized to his mixed marriage, which would have been illegal in the commonwealth until the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia.

UPDATE: Since the election, he has been maximizing family time, Sarvis said.

Im a typical overly proud father. I love seeing Harlan and Ai-Li Mae grow, play, and learn new things. Im also incredibly proud of my wife, Astrid, who finished her residency and was accepted into her top choice of pediatric emergency medicine fellowship programs, he said. Well run out the clock on 2013 before returning to the stresses of the real world in the new year.

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Faces of 2013: Robert Sarvis