Votes are In – and How Did Glendale vote?

Last week the CV Weekly reported the final results of Glendale’s 2017 municipal elections, telling us who won and lost. But the 2017 election also told us that Glendale has become a city that votes by mail. The number of people who vote-by-mail has been growing for years. In 2009, 56% of the Glendale electorate cast their ballots by mail, 63% of the electorate did the same in 2011, 66% did the same in 2013, 68% in 2015 and this year nearly 73% voted-by-mail.

How is this trend impacting our elections? The election for Glendale City Council this year was decided by mail-in votes. The successful candidates, Ara Najarian, Vrej Agajarian and Zareh Sinanyan, each received more than 7,300 votes-by-mail before the precincts opened on Election Day. Mark MacCarley, who finished fourth, received a total of 6,941 votes from mail-in votes and precinct turnout on Election Day. The election was decided before the precincts opened April 4.

What does this trend mean? According to the City Clerk’s Office, there are about 48,000 permanent vote-by-mail voters in Glendale. The names and addresses of all permanent vote-by-mail voters are public information and available at the LA County Clerk’s Office. This allows candidates to start their campaigns as early as they want.

In 2019, incumbents Paula Devine and Vartan Gharpetian will be running for re-election to the Glendale City Council and have already started their reelection campaigns. If anybody in the Crescenta Valley wants to unseat them in the April 2019 election, they need to get started ASAP.

Early voting has become popular across the United States and Glendale is clearly one of the national leaders in the vote-by-mail movement.

Lynn McGinnis

Glendale

Chimes of St. Luke’s

I just finished reading the article about the repair/refurbish of St. Luke’s chimes [Religion, May 4]. I live two blocks from the church and have always enjoyed them. There has been more than one article over the years about the system. An electro-mechanical system from the 1920s would require a lot of maintenance. What we hear are the chimes being struck by an electrical solenoid arrangement. What we do not hear is the gears, cams and other mechanical apparatus. On page 30 of the May 2017 Nuts and Volts magazine is an article about rebuilding a four-chime doorbell. The doorbell had a mechanical switch that controlled solenoids that rang the chimes. The author designed an electronic micro-processor system to trigger the solenoids in place of the electro-mechanical arrangement. If the church chimes control system were to be replaced by a PC based system I do not think we would know the difference. A search of all of the solenoids available today may just find replacements that would strike the chimes in a way we would not be able to tell the difference in sound. If the author was able to replace the doorbell controller, there should be somebody in our area who could come up with something. How about all of those PHD electronic engineers at JPL? Better yet, make the design of the system a project for a masters or doctoral candidate?

Tom Suter

La Crescenta