Glendale Judge Wins Election to Nolan’s Seat in Assembly : Politics: James Rogan gets more than 50% of vote in seven-candidate field. He will immediately take office to finish convicted lawmaker’s term in 43rd District.

Glendale Municipal Judge James Rogan, who pitched himself to voters as a man who had raised himself up by his bootstraps and is tough on crime, was elected Tuesday to fill the state Assembly seat left vacant by the resignation of Pat Nolan.

Final returns showed Rogan, a Republican, winning 53.9% of the votes in the seven-candidate field. He easily outdistanced Democrat front-runner Adam Schiff, a former assistant U.S. attorney, who had 25.6%.

Rogan, 36, will immediately be sworn in as the representative of the 43rd Assembly District, which includes Glendale, Burbank, Los Feliz and Silver Lake. He will fill out the remainder of the current term, which expires Dec. 5.

The vacancy arose when Nolan was forced to resign after pleading guilty Feb. 18 to one count of racketeering, a charge stemming from an FBI sting operation against Sacramento lawmakers.

Rogan, Schiff and the other candidates are not finished with each other, however.

In fact, 43rd District voters will go to the polls again on June 7 to pick their party’s nominee to run for the district’s new two-year term that begins on Dec. 5.

The nominees picked from that election will face each other in the final election Nov. 8. In addition to the seven candidates featured in Tuesday’s election, three more will enter the June 7 contest, one Democrat and two Republicans.

Voter turnout Tuesday was extraordinarily light. One man went to his polling place at mid-morning and was the fourth to cast a ballot in a precinct with more than 400 voters.

There were foul-ups that may have contributed to the skimpy turnout. Some Democratic voters, for example, got conflicting signals about where to vote.

“It’s been a nightmare,” said Barbara Grover, a Schiff political consultant. Grover said some voters were instructed in the official sample ballot they received from the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder to vote in one place but told to vote in another place by a Schiff mailer.

The confusion occurred when the county sent some incorrect information about the whereabouts of some polling places to the Schiff campaign, which reproduced the wrong addresses and mailed them to voters.

SOUTHLAND ELECTION

* State Assembly

43rd District

Special Primary Election

(Unexpired term ending Dec. 5, 1994) 272 of 272 Precincts Reporting

CANDIDATE VOTE James E. Rogan (R) 10,896 Adam Schiff (D) 5,182 Julia L. Wu (R) 2,060 David E. Wallis Jr. (R)824 Ken Kulpa (D) 527 Willard Michlin (L) 427 Joseph Paul Pietroforte (R) 317

(D) Democrat

(L) Libertarian

(R) Republican