Justice Dept. Considers Monitoring 69th District : Politics: Latino group requests action after GOP assemblyman announced plans to put volunteer poll watchers at 21 precincts.

Acting on a request from a Latino voting rights group, the U.S. Justice Department said Wednesday it is considering whether to monitor precincts in the 69th Assembly District on Election Day to ensure voters are not being intimidated by partisan poll watchers.

The local office of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund asked for the federal monitors after Assemblyman Mickey Conroy (R-Garden Grove) said he planned to have volunteer poll watchers at 21 precincts in the 69th District, where he and other Republicans believe Democrats have engaged in voter fraud.

Democrats and Latino political activists have expressed outrage over Conroy’s plan, calling it a repeat of a 1988 incident in which the county GOP posted uniformed security guards at Latino precincts in what is now the 69th District.

John Tanner, a spokesman for the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said his office would not decide until just before the election whether to seek a court order approving federal monitors.

“At this point, we have received a call about it and are trying to get information,” he said. “What we do next is impossible to say.”

Although their participation has been requested in the past, federal officials have never officially monitored an election in Orange County.

John Palacio, who heads the local MALDEF office, said that in addition to requesting the Justice Department’s monitoring of the Nov. 8 election, MALDEF is also seeking a federal review of what Conroy intends to do.

Palacio said he will meet with county election officials today to learn the ground rules for poll watching so that his own group of volunteer attorneys can address any issues that may arise on Election Day.

Meanwhile, Conroy insisted Wednesday that his volunteers would not directly question voters or interfere in the voting process, but would check the list of those who had voted against their own list of names that they believe are bogus registrations. He vowed this would not be a repeat of the 1988 poll guard incident that resulted in the GOP paying a $400,000 out-of-court settlement.

“Tell (the Democrats), ‘Don’t waste their money with the Justice Department.’ You only learn your lessons one time,” Conroy said. “We will do a close scrutiny of the voters in the 69th District. That’s my promise.”

Last week, Conroy and 10 local GOP legislators sent a letter to county Registrar of Voters Donald Tanney, asking that he purge the voter rolls in the 69th District because of what they called suspected voter fraud by the Democrats. Tanney, who is still conducting his review, said earlier this week that a preliminary check of names submitted by the Republicans showed that no one had ever attempted to vote twice.

On Wednesday, Conroy sent another letter to Tanney, suggesting that he “red tag” voters with multiple registrations if they have the same birth date and the same residence; voters with similar spellings of first or last names; and voters with identical names and birth dates but with different addresses.

Conroy’s office also released the voter registration stubs of an Anaheim couple who claimed that earlier this year they were signed up to vote in front of an Anaheim grocery store but that their registration cards were never submitted to the county because they declined to state their political party.

Although Conroy cannot prove who was to blame for the registration cards not being turned into the county, his aide, Jim Bieber, said he had reason to believe the couple’s voter registration was not handled by Republicans.

Even as Conroy stood by his belief that the polls in the 69th District need to be monitored by GOP volunteers, some of his fellow Republicans cautioned that the plan could backfire if it is misinterpreted as an attempt to intimidate Latino voters.

Mindful of the political setback suffered by the GOP after the 1988 election, Assemblyman Gil Ferguson (R-Newport Beach) said the idea of poll monitors may be touching an “exposed political nerve.”

“Because it was handled badly the first time, it is now an exposed political nerve that should not be revisited,” Ferguson said. “There are other ways to ensure the integrity of the ballot without putting a sharp stick into the exposed nerve.”

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Assemblyman Curt Pringle (R-Garden Grove), who won the 1988 election in the district where the poll guards were posted, tried to distance himself from Conroy’s plan. He said he had not discussed the proposal with Conroy, but added that it did not sound like anything out of the ordinary.

Pringle and other Republicans said both political parties routinely watch to see who has voted on Election Day to monitor the progress of their get-out-the-vote campaigns.

“I am touching a sensitive nerve,” Conroy admitted. “I understand the difference between obstructing people (attempting to vote) and going in and making sure that the election is legal and fair. That’s a whole different ballgame, and nothing in the world can stop me from doing that.”

Bieber, Conroy’s aide, emphasized there would be no attempt to intimidate voters. “If the poll guards (incident) had never happened, nobody would be batting an eye at this suggestion,” he said.

But Democrats are outraged. In the 46th Congressional District, which overlaps with the 69th Assembly District, a spokesman for Democratic nominee Mike Farber said the campaign would legally challenge any attempt by Republicans to have poll watchers.

Jim Prince, Farber’s campaign spokesman, said Democrats do not believe Conroy’s assurances that voters in the Latino precincts would not be intimidated. “Why aren’t they putting (poll watchers) in Newport Beach? Why are they putting them in minority areas? That’s intimidation,” he said.