Update Friday, April 11, 2014 (final official voting results):
For the first time in years, Arcadia residents will have two first-time City Council Members starting new four-year terms on Tuesday, April 15 — Tom Beck and Sho Tay. Joining them to make up the trio of candidates elected Tuesday night is longtime Council Member and former Mayor Roger Chandler who returns after a mandatory two-year hiatus. The two losing candidates were Burton Brink with 46.7% of the vote (3,043 votes), and Paul Van Fleet with 498 votes (less than 7.6%).
Tom Beck and his wife thank supporters moments after election results were finalized.
Recently retired lawyer Beck, in his first campaign for any public office, was widely expected to win one of the three seats and probably one of the first two, but he surprised many by dominating every voting precinct in the city in Tuesday night’s election results, accumulating nearly 64% (4,190) of the votes on the 6,516 ballots submitted. At his election night party at his large home in northern Arcadia, Beck attributed his victory to his wife’s support and her involvement in Assistance League of Arcadia and other local organizations, and to Mayor Mickey Segal’s decision not to run for re-election. Segal, who declared Beck a victor very early on when results showed Beck with more than 2,000 votes after only three of seven blocks of precincts reporting, steps down next Tuesday along with termed-out Council Member Bob Harbicht. Segal and Harbicht were at Beck’s house Tuesday night along with the only two current mid-term Council Members who remain on the Council, Gary Kovacic and Mayor Pro Tem John Wuo.
Sho Tay addresses the media minutes after election results were announced.
Ironically, as much as Sho Tay campaigned on a platform of increasing voter turnout, the five-time candidate beat multi-term former Mayor and Council Member Chandler by 19 votes (3,594 vs 3,575) and handily beat newcomer Burton Brink by eight-and-a-half percentage points (55.2% vs 46.7%) and by 551 votes despite one of the lowest turnouts ever for a City Council election. Tay, after four previous unsuccessful campaigns, garnered more votes than Chandler in three of the seven groups of voting precincts. Only about 22% (6,516) of 29,382 registered voters participated in the all-mail-in ballot election, according to official final results reported by the City Clerk’s office this late afternoon. More than 430 ballots that came in late Tuesday were tallied today. Some voters were observed turning in ballots in person at City Hall just 10-minutes before the 8 p.m. deadline despite having about a month to submit ballots. Small stacks of ballots were still being delivered by mail to City Hall Thursday, none of which were counted since they came in after the Tuesday deadline, and people were still coming to the Arcadia Chamber of Commerce on Thursday asking when was the election and how could they get a ballot. The lowest turnout in recent years was just 16% in 2008, an election that also involved Chandler when he and Kovacic were essentially the only two candidates running in a two-seat election that should not have been required except that a first-timer turned in an application minutes before the deadline and then never participated in the campaign.
Singpoli’s Kin Hui speaks to media with Sho Tay (right)
At his election night party hosted by Kin Hui’s Singpoli offices in Arcadia, Tay told media and supporters that he intends to follow through on his campaign pledges to work to unify the various cultures in town, to support and promote local businesses, and to find financial savings for the city and residents. He also thanked his wife Sherry Tay for her support over the many challenging campaigns. With a potential total of 18,255 (up to three votes per ballot), the total number of votes cast, 13,694, would seem to indicate that almost all voters cast only two votes each, or that as many as more than a third of all voters, or more than 2,000, employed the “bullet” voting strategy of voting for only one candidate while the other 3,500-plus voted for the maximum of three choices. Van Fleet said early in the campaign that he would spend virtually no money on his campaign and accept no donations, and he stuck to that, not even paying the nearly $2,300 to include a photo and statement on the election ballot. That strategy combined with his lack of familiarity among voters apparently resulted in his small number of votes. Hours after the election, he posted on his blog here at ArcadiasBest.com that he will run again in 2016.
But while his was a campaign of austerity, there was a general minimalist approach to the entire campaign coupled with a puzzling overall voter and community apathy for an election resulting in the most change on the Council in decades and with four of the five candidates all newcomers. Yet there was only a couple meet-the-candidates forums when there are usually five or six. The only time the campaign registered a blip on the radar screen was when Tay’s campaign raised the eyebrows of some residents and the Arcadia police when several Tay supporters — male and female from student teens to retirement age Caucasian and Chinese-American volunteers — went door-to-door offering to provide free stamps to voters to encourage them to mail their sealed ballots. A handful of ballots were handed to campaign workers of all ages, genders, and race who offered to put them in a mailbox for the residents. When a few residents in northern Arcadia called police about the young male Chinese-American volunteers coming to their door, Arcadia police initiated citywide robo calls and text alerts and then conducted interviews with Tay and his campaign supporters. As the investigation was turned over to the District Attorney last week to determine whether any election laws were violated or any charges should be filed, Tay revised the get-out-the-vote initiative by making free stamps available to anyone to pick up at two local businesses. Now Tay will be sworn in as a City Council Member next Tuesday along with Beck and Chandler.
— By Scott Hettrick