Election Results Stir Vietnamese Community Rancor

A meeting to settle grievances over a disputed election in the Vietnamese community turned into a victory ceremony Sunday for an Irvine businessman who was officially declared the new leader of expatriates throughout Southern California.

Immediately afterward, members of a losing party in the election for president of the Vietnamese Community of Southern California called the meeting a sham and said they might appeal election results to a board of representatives from 88 Vietnamese organizations in the region.

“I thought the idea of the election was a good thing, but now I feel cheated,” said Hong Mai Nguyen of Los Angeles. “The way this election was handled was all wrong.”

Amid the controversy, Ban Binh Bui, the new president, is faced with uniting 300,000 Vietnamese from Santa Barbara to San Diego into a political force, although only 5,000 Southern Californians of Vietnamese descent voted in the Jan. 2 election.

Supporters of Bui’s rival, Huu Dinh Vo, a pediatrician from Pomona, claim the voting failed to meet the organization’s election guidelines. They say 162 votes--enough to swing the election to Vo--were unaccounted for, and that the balloting ran 40 minutes overtime.

An initial count showed that Bui had 2,273 votes; Vo received 2,191; and Chung Nguyen, a computer analyst from Westminster, who ran from a third party, had 622 votes, according to election organizers.

Invitations for the meeting, held at Cafe Tao Phung on Garden Grove Boulevard, said the purpose was to settle complaints from the ticket headed by Vo.

The invitations from the election committee of the Vietnamese Community of Southern California were sent to the organization’s former board members, the advisory panel for the election committee, the press, the three candidates and their supporters, and to voters concerned about the election results.

Many said they came expecting to hear Vo’s complaints and discussion about how to resolve the election dispute. However, the election committee had decided to hold a hearing about the voting in private Saturday afternoon without notifying the public, according to Chau Tue Carey, head of the volunteer election committee.

“Our guidelines do not require us to have voters at the hearing,” Carey said Sunday. “If that was so, we’d have to have all 5,000 of them.”

Carey said the election committee and its advisory panel had listened to Vo’s 15 complaints and had judged them to have been caused by technical difficulties outside the organizers’ control.

She said the committee concluded the voting ran overtime because balloting had started 40 minutes late. But nobody could explain the difference of 162 votes, she said.

“We don’t know if it was a paperwork problem or what, but we don’t know where those ballots are,” said Carey, adding that she had voted for Vo.

According to Carey, the election committee and its advisory panel met and jointly voted 14 to 4 to accept Bui as the victor.

Vo, who was represented at the private meeting Saturday, said he came to Cafe Tao Phung expecting a discussion of his complaints.

But instead, the result of the private vote on Saturday was announced at 1 p.m. Sunday to the gathering of about 100 people at the restaurant.

Many clapped and cheered, but Vo and his supporters were stunned. Several raised their hands to make comments. However, organizers said they would take questions from the press first.

Several journalists from the Vietnamese-language media then said they had no questions and called for all three candidates to shake hands onstage, which they did to a standing ovation.

Outside the restaurant, Vo’s supporters were furious.

“This is a revolt against the voters,” said Dung Nguyen of Garden Grove. “This is like giving weapons to the Communists to fight against us. They’ll say that if we expatriates can’t have a democratic election here, then how can we be responsible for a democratic election in Vietnam?”

Vo said he had gone onstage so he wouldn’t appear a sore loser, but that he was dissatisfied.

“Even if they had made their decisions . . . without discussion, which was not right, they still should have told me first instead of letting me find out along with everyone else,” he said.

Vu Hoang, a member of the election committee, said that organizers had wanted to hear comments from Vo, but that he had come 45 minutes late Saturday. Vo’s supporters were allowed to speak at the end of the meeting but “it’s not our fault if people were ready to leave and didn’t listen to them,” Hoang said.

Vo said he and other members of his ticket will meet and decide how to react to the election committee’s action.