Grand Jury to Question Registrar Employees

Opening a new phase in the investigation of former Registrar of Voters Ray Ortiz, the San Diego County Grand Jury this week issued subpoenas to several of Ortiz’s former employees at the registrar’s office.

The employees have been ordered to appear before the grand jury beginning Wednesday.

Tom Green, coordinator of election planning for the county, and his wife, Delores, a clerk in election administration, were among those who received subpoenas Thursday and Friday, Tom Green said.

Registrar’s spokeswoman Maggie Edwards said she was served with a subpoena Friday morning when she arrived at work.

Also among those ordered to appear were acting Registrar Keith Boyer, a source close to the investigation said Friday. Registrar’s employees Connie Chappell, Judy Nelson, Ingrid Gonzales, Sally Burgan and Nick Casillas were also said to have received subpoenas.

Tom Green, Gonzales and Burgan were among those who accompanied Ortiz on a trip to Chicago earlier this year. Expenses for the trip were paid for by companies doing business or hoping to do business with the registrar’s office.

Linda Miller, a spokeswoman for Dist. Atty. Edwin Miller, said the grand jury will begin its probe of Ortiz on Wednesday. She would not elaborate on the subpoenas or the investigation.

“Going to the grand jury is just a continuation of our investigation,” Linda Miller said. Word of the grand jury’s involvement was the first development in the Ortiz probe since August, when a San Diego Superior Court judge released affidavits that were filed to justify searches of the homes of Ortiz and several of his associates.

Those documents showed that the district attorney was probing allegations of embezzlement, grand theft and presenting false claims involving Ortiz and several of his friends and associates.

According to the affidavit, Ortiz ordered a private company doing business with his office to make payments to a friend of his, then for the company to 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 the district attorney’s investigator believed Ortiz may have steered more than $400,000 in contracts to an Escondido company owned by another close friend. The affidavit said Ortiz used “misleading information, collusion and favoritism” to guide the contracts to Election Data Corp.

Lora Lee Stephens, who with her husband, Richard, owns Election Data and another firm that does business with the county, said Friday that neither she nor her husband has been summoned to appear before the grand jury.

“We have not been contacted at all,” she said. “I don’t know what they’re doing. I don’t know what they think they’ve got. We were very surprised.”

Ortiz, who resigned Sept. 1 to take a job with a Pennsylvania firm that supplies elections equipment, could not be reached for comment Friday.