Broberg increases lead over Blumenfeld
Incumbent Jeanne Broberg has increased her razor-thin lead over 20-year-old challenger Andrew Blumenfeld to 14 votes in the La Cañada Unified School District race, according to numbers posted Friday by the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder.
The pair are battling it out for one of two seats decided in Tuesday’s election. Ellen Multari appears to have secured one seat with 2,039 votes, or 31% of the vote. Broberg is running second with 1,764 votes, or about 27%, but Blumenfeld follows closely with 1,750 votes. The difference leaves Blumenfeld about 0.2% behind Broberg.
A fourth candidate, Ernest Koeppen, currently has 944 votes, slightly less than 15% of the vote.
County officials will continue to count provisional and mail-in ballots through Nov. 21, at which time the final tallies will go to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors for certification.
When preliminary results were posted early Wednesday morning, Blumenfeld trailed Broberg by just a dozen votes.
The Princeton University student said he would be willing to request a recount if he finished a near third.
Blumenfeld is not the youngest person to sets his sights on public office, much less a La Cañada Unified school board seat. In February 1975, then-19-year-old Occidental College student Steve Rice ran in a field of five, promising voters creative decision making and more attention to the elementary school sites.
“I think my idea was that I wanted to bring what I called a bright new perspective to the school board that wasn’t represented by the older, more established people who might not necessarily have a recent-student point of view,” said Rice, who went onto Harvard Law School and now works as a business trial lawyer in Irvine.
The 1973 La Cañada High School valedictorian and the youngest candidate in La Cañada school board history did not win a seat, finishing fourth. But he described running for public office as a “great experience.”
“Even though I am on the other end of the age spectrum, or getting there, I would encourage young people to try it,” Rice said. “If there is a 20-year-old candidate, good for them.”