Glendale Judge Wins Race for Seat in Assembly : Elections: GOP’s James Rogan will fill Pat Nolan’s unexpired term in the 43rd District. He is expected to be sworn in Monday.

Glendale Municipal Court Judge James Rogan, who pitched himself to voters as a man who had raised himself up by his bootstraps and was tough on crime, was elected Tuesday to fill the state Assembly District 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 Democratic front-runner Adam Schiff, a former assistant U. S. attorney, who received 25.6% of the vote.

Rogan, 36, is expected to be sworn in Monday 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 on Dec. 5.

“This catches me and everybody else by surprise,” Rogan said Tuesday night. “I just got off the phone from Gov. Wilson and looking forward to going to Sacramento to work on the Wilson team.”

The temporary vacancy arose after 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.

To win election Rogan had to deal with questions about his past as a former activist in the Democratic Party. In 1988, Rogan switched parties after being a member of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party Central Committee for a number of years.

Then-Sen. Pete Wilson even held up Rogan as a trophy convert at a news conference, and within two years Gov. George Deukmejian had appointed Rogan to the judgeship. Rogan’s switch has been the target of some criticism from his Republican foes, who have called it a character issue. It was even suggested that he changed parties to get a seat on the bench.

But Rogan countered that his credentials and the integrity of his beliefs have been well-tested, enough so that he won the endorsement of a majority of Assembly Republicans and the backing of Allied Business PAC, a conservative Christian group run by four wealthy businessmen and investors and their wives.

Rogan is anti-abortion, a strong foe of gun controls and a supporter of voucher programs to provide financial help to parents with children in private schools.

Rogan’s toughest GOP challenger was Julia Wu, a member of the Los Angeles Community College District board of trustees.

In the final days before the election, Rogan and Wu traded charges and counter-charges as they vied for Republican votes and tried to paint the other as the more liberal.

Wu accused Rogan, who was formerly a deputy district attorney, of being softer on crime than his tough campaign posturing would indicate. And she raised the issue of Rogan’s former Democratic Party involvement.

Rogan, on the other hand, countered that Wu had a record of casting fiscally irresponsible and self-interested votes as a college trustee.

Wu received 10.2% of the vote.

Rogan concentrated his campaign efforts on courting the conservative Glendale Republicans that formed the backbone of Nolan’s political support with a message that highlighted his Horatio Alger origins of overcoming a broken family life to become a top prosecutor and judge.

Schiff’s goal during the campaigning was to introduce himself to voters and map out a strategy aimed at wooing Republicans.

Rogan, Wu, 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 on 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.

Among the new Republicans will be Peter Repovich, a Los Angeles police officer who works a community relations detail in Hollywood. Although a political newcomer, Repovich has raised more than $300,000 for his campaign--making him the top fund-raiser in the 43rd District.

Even before the polls had closed Tuesday, Repovich was challenging his GOP cohorts, Wu and Rogan, to debate him in the run-up to the June 7 Republican primary.

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.

And there were foul-ups that might have contributed to the skimpy turnout. Some Democratic voters, for instance, got conflicting signals on 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 unwittingly reproduced the wrong addresses and mailed it to voters.

SOUTHLAND ELECTION

* State Assembly

43rd District

Special Primary Election

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

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

(D) Democrat

(L) Libertarian

(R) Republican