Ortiz Quits as Registrar in Wake of Allegations From Criminal Probe

San Diego County Registrar of Voters Ray Ortiz quit his job Wednesday amid a criminal investigation of him and his office.

Ortiz’s resignation came one day after a Superior Court judge released documents showing that the district attorney’s office was probing allegations of embezzlement, grand theft and presenting false claims involving Ortiz and several of his friends and associates.

According to the affidavit, filed in support of a warrant to search Ortiz’s home and other locations, Ortiz ordered a private company doing business with his office to make payments to a friend of his, then recover the money by falsifying bills submitted to the county. One of the payments was signed over to Ortiz by his friend and deposited in Ortiz’s credit union account.

The court papers also showed that a district attorney’s investigator believed Ortiz may have steered more than $400,000 in contracts to an Escondido company owned by another close friend of the registrar. The affidavit said Ortiz used “misleading information, collusion and favoritism” to guide the contracts to Election Data Corp.

No criminal charges have been filed against Ortiz, 51, and a deputy district attorney involved in the case said Wednesday that the investigation will continue indefinitely.

Ortiz announced his resignation in a one-sentence statement released by the office of his attorney, Merle Schneidewind.

“I have instructed my attorney to prepare my resignation as registrar effective Sept. 1, 1986,” Ortiz said in the statement.

At a press conference Tuesday evening, Ortiz, who has been on voluntary leave from his job since July 17, said he doubted he would return. He said he felt betrayed by top county administrators because they launched a full-scale investigation of him without first asking him to explain his actions.

“I am not guilty of anything outlined in (the affidavit),” he said.

According to the affidavit, the investigation began in March when three registrar’s office employees went to Deputy Chief Administrative Officer John Sauvajot with allegations about Ortiz’s close relationship with Richard Stephens, owner of Election Data Corp. of Escondido. Election Data has done more than $400,000 in business with the registrar’s office since 1984.

Sauvajot in turn referred the matter to county Auditor and Controller Rod Calvao, who ordered an audit of Ortiz’s office and then called in the district attorney’s office for further investigation. The report released Tuesday revealed that district attorney investigators followed Ortiz for nearly three weeks, eavesdropped on his conversations and kept in close contact with two confidential informants in the registrar’s office.

“If they had a problem in March or April prior to the June primary, why didn’t they approach me at that time?” Ortiz said Tuesday night. “Why did they in essence keep following me, making notes, all the way through the election? If I’m doing something wrong in March, let me know in March, not the night before the election or after.”

County Chief Administrator Norman Hickey said Wednesday that he has no regrets about the way his staff handled the probe.

“It’s really a protection for the employee as well as the county,” Hickey said of the decision to conduct the audit without first consulting Ortiz. “If you were to tell him, there’s often the charge that there’s a cover-up. This way it follows legal and accepted accounting practices.”

Hickey said the county will immediately begin a search for Ortiz’s successor. The November election will be handled by acting Registrar Keith Boyer.

Boyer said Wednesday that he expects the election to go smoothly without Ortiz, despite the fact that it will be the largest and most complex election ever held in San Diego County.

At Ortiz’s initiation, many of the county’s cities, school districts and special districts have agreed to consolidate their elections with the major statewide and federal races contested in even-numbered years. As a result, there will be 496 different ballot types prepared for the fall election, compared to the usual 150 ballots.

Boyer said he will rely heavily in November on the dozens of registrar’s workers who have handled past elections and would have played a major role in this fall’s contests even if Ortiz had remained on the job.

“I’m not saying anything relative to his (Ortiz’s) ability or my ability,” Boyer said. “I’m looking at the people who are going to conduct the election. They are outstanding.”

Ortiz was en route Wednesday to Pennsylvania, where he is to begin work immediately as a consultant to R.F. Shoup Co., a manufacturer of electronic voting equipment.

Company President Ransom Shoup said in an interview that this week’s developments will not affect his firm’s relationship with Ortiz.

“We feel Ray is a very honorable man,” Shoup said. “He feels he is going to be cleared of all the allegations made. He’s gone over it with us. We have no reason not to believe what he says.”

Since he was hired as registrar in 1979, Ortiz, a former Army paratrooper, has built a reputation as one of the nation’s more innovative election administrators. Some of his experiments have been quirky, such as when he sent Boyer up in a biplane over San Diego beaches pulling a banner that read “REGISTER TO VOTE.” Other Ortiz novelties have been more serious, such as when he conducted the nation’s largest-ever mail-ballot election in 1981.

Ortiz is also credited with modernizing the registrar’s office through the widespread use of computers to count votes and microfiche to keep track of registered voters. His avowed faith in the efficiency of private enterprise and his widespread use of contractors--particularly Stephens--helped prompt the investigation that led to his resignation.

Board of Supervisors Chairman Paul Eckert said Ortiz did “an excellent job” as registrar.

“If in fact the district attorney is wrong, it would be unfortunate that we were to lose Mr. Ortiz over that issue,” he said.