Which makes it hard to understand why GOOGL (with voting rights) has traded a smidge lower than GOOG (w/o voting rights) for several years now, I believe.

Yes, it's a bit of a surprise, if not a mystery.
There is no doubt that a share of GOOGL is worth some hard-to-quantify amount more than a share of GOOG.

I have read that the reasoning goes like this:
The founding bosses want to keep their voting share, so they are selling GOOG stock without votes to raise money for beer and pizza.
But they want to get a good price for the shares they are selling, so they are using their control of the firm to ensure that the firm is buying GOOG (non voting) shares instead of GOOGL (voting) shares.
This causes a *very* slight premium for GOOG over what it "should" be.
Other market participants, noting all of the above, come to expect GOOG to be stronger (even though it's worth less), so they bid it up a bit more, widening the small premium to a bigger one.

I would have expected them to have the company buy and retire voting shares so that their own voting power is maximized, somewhat akin to what Mr Buffett has done, so I thought perhaps they have so much voting control that there is no need to bother. But no: apparently they have only about 51.4% voting control, pretty close to the wire. So I guess the reasoning is different: since they have absolutely no need to sell ANY voting shares (lots of non-voting shares to liquidate), the 51.4% fraction won't be falling at all, so they're secure, so they can use the reasoning above.

Jim