Nine Candidates Vying Today to Replace Caldera

Nine candidates--five Democrats, three Republicans and a Libertarian--are in a special election today to replace Louis Caldera as the representative of the 46th Assembly District.

Polling places in the 45 precincts will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.

The district, which has the lowest number of registered voters of the state’s 80 Assembly districts--46,630--includes parts of the Eastside and downtown, Chinatown, Little Tokyo, West Adams, Pico-Union and Koreatown. It is considered a safe seat for Democrats because they outnumber Republican voters 4 to 1.

As of Monday afternoon, county registrar-recorder officials reported that about 4,000 absentee ballots had been mailed in.

Officials made no projection about today’s turnout, but they note that 30% of the district’s voters went to the polls in the March 1996 primary, when Caldera, a Democrat, and Republican Andrew Kim, an attorney, won their party’s nomination.

In the general election, in which Caldera beat Kim to win a third two-year term, 52.8% of the district’s registered voters turned out. That was below the countywide turnout of 64.95% for that general election.

Several prominent Democrats are in the race to succeed Caldera. They are Los Angeles school board member Vickie Castro; Gil Cedillo, former general manager of Los Angeles County’s largest employees union; and attorney Ricardo Torres, son of a Los Angeles Superior Court judge.

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Two other Democrats, lawyer and teacher Manuel Diaz and family health educator Marijane Jackson, also are on the ballot.

Kim is running again for the seat and is joined by two other Republicans--businessman Roberto Galvan and building and safety engineer Khalil Khalil.

Computer repair technician Patrick Westerberg is the Libertarian candidate.

If no candidate gets a majority of the votes cast today, the top vote-getter in each party will meet in a runoff election Jan. 13.

Caldera, who was first elected in 1992, resigned in September to join the Clinton administration as managing director of the Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal agency that promotes volunteerism.