Judge to Hear Lawsuit Today Over GOP Use of Poll Guards

After 2 months of partisan charges and countercharges, a lawsuit challenging the Orange County Republican Party’s decision to station uniformed security guards at polling places in 20 largely Latino precincts on Election Day is to go before a federal judge today.

In U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, Judge J. Spencer Letts will hear motions to dismiss the lawsuit, which was brought by Latino groups, a laborers’ union and several individuals.

Among the defendants are the county and state Republican Party organizations, county Republican Party Chairman Thomas A. Fuentes and Assemblyman Curt Pringle (R-Garden Grove).

Pringle won the 72nd Assembly District election in November over Democrat Christian F. (Rick) Thierbach by 867 votes. All 20 Santa Ana voting precincts to which the guards were sent are in the 72nd District.

Local Democrats Keep Issue Alive

On another front, county Democrats resolved last week to ask for up to $100,000 from the state Democratic Party at its convention next weekend in Sacramento to pay for an attempt to recall Pringle because of the guards incident. While the resolution is given little chance of passing, it has served as a rallying point for local Democrats who want to keep the issue alive.

Fuentes and others involved in hiring the guards have said they were a necessary precaution because of rumors that Democrats might try to bus illegal voters into the 72nd District to tip the election to Thierbach.

The Latino groups’ lawsuit alleges that the guards, who were carrying signs in Spanish admonishing non-citizens not to vote, intimidated first-time Latino voters and may have frightened them away from the polls. It asks that election results in the district be overturned.

“They found the weakest link in our party,” Stanton City Councilman Sal Sapien told Democrats meeting last week in Santa Ana. “Here we have people who are going to vote for the first time in their lives, who are normally intimidated by uniforms. . . . So therefore, the first time they get to the polling place, they have these people in uniforms asking them for ID, asking them for registration, asking them if they are citizens of the United States. And many of them had a hard time understanding what it was all about.”

Letts, who was appointed to the federal bench during the Reagan presidency, will hear arguments on whether the plaintiffs have standing to sue over the guards.

He will also weigh the defendants’ assertions that no actual harm can be shown because there is no proof that anyone actually failed to vote because of the guards.

But even if this assertion is so, plaintiffs’ attorney Kathleen Purcell argued in papers filed with the court, “the right to vote . . . encompasses more than merely the right to mark a ballot. It includes within its scope the right to be free from coercion, intimidation and retaliation for exercising the franchise.”

Sapien Leads Movement

The county Democratic Party’s effort to get a Pringle recall movement afoot has been led by Sapien.

“If we can commit the state party to do something about this, we have a better chance of redressing the issue,” Sapien said at a Democratic Central Committee meeting last week. “Even if it’s $1,000, whatever it is. . . .”

But so far the recall idea has brought a tepid response from Democratic leaders.

Assembly Speaker Pro Tem Mike Roos (D-Los Angeles) said he thinks it is good that Democrats are keeping the guards issue before public, “but in terms of it becoming a major Democratic effort . . . I don’t think that’s to be.”

Susan Jetton, spokeswoman for Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco), said Brown is “appalled and displeased” over the use of the guards and “the implied blocking of people’s right to vote.”

She added, however, that “we haven’t seen any evidence that it made a difference in the outcome” of the election. “Barring that evidence, I don’t know what could be done.”

But Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), who helped Thierbach run his campaign, said the recall effort is “a way to remind people that just because the election is over with, people still have to take responsibility for their actions, whether it’s Curt Pringle or Tom Fuentes.”

County Democratic Party Chairman Mike Balmages said local Democrats would like to get money from the state party organization to use for the recall “or alternatively on a very early start on taking back the seat in 1990.”

Balmages, responding to earlier criticism by Fuentes that the guards issue was being used for partisan politics, agreed.

“I think he’s right,” Balmages said. “I think it is a partisan political issue.”

But he added, “We ought not to let the people who perpetrated it . . . get away with it.”

Fuentes could not be reached for comment about recent developments.