The State - News from Sept. 4, 1985

A voting fraud investigation in San Francisco that touched off a furor in 1982, when U.S. Atty. Joseph Russoniello had the names of bilingual ballot applicants forwarded to immigration officials, was upheld by a divided federal appeals court. Any burden that the investigation placed on voting rights and the political rights of minority organizations was outweighed by “the government’s need to ensure the sanctity of the polls,” said Judge J. Clifford Wallace in a 2-1 ruling by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The suit by Jose Olagues, a U.S. citizen who was one of those investigated, and by minority groups was dismissed in a series of U.S. District Court rulings upheld by the appeals court, which said courts should interfere in a federal prosecutor’s investigation only in “extraordinary circumstances.”