Dornan, With Slim Lead, Raises Issue of Voting Fraud

While the Orange County registrar of voters prepared to tabulate outstanding absentee ballots Wednesday, Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) asserted that voter fraud could influence the outcome in the 46th Congressional District race, where he is narrowly ahead.

Dornan leads Democrat Loretta Sanchez by 233 votes, with 6,000 to 10,000 ballots from this central Orange County district still to be counted. Both sides have said they could seek a recount of the election results.

In addition, Dornan said Monday that he is prepared to appeal a loss to the House of Representatives, which is the final arbiter of the election of its members.

The Sanchez campaign rejected the allegations and called Dornan “desperate.”

Regardless, the Orange County registrar may not decide the winner even on Wednesday. Officials say they plan to complete the count by Nov. 26.

Countywide, 68,000 absentee ballots were handed in at polling places or arrived in the mail on election day or the day before. In addition, there are 15,000 to 20,000 so-called provisional ballots countywide, which were cast at polling places on election day. These will not be counted until they are validated, a process that could take a week to 10 days, Registrar of Voters Rosalyn Lever said Monday.

Before counting the provisional ballots, registrar officials must determine that these voters did not try to vote twice using an absentee ballot or improperly persuade polling place officials to permit them to vote when their names were not on voter lists, she said.

Dornan, who is seeking election to a 10th term, predicted Monday that he would fall behind “by a handful of votes” after the late-arriving absentee ballots are counted. “But I will win by the provisionals, overcoming any small deficit,” he said.

Dornan raised the issue of voter fraud and intervention by the House together, saying his Republican colleagues are hunting for a case around which they can challenge registration procedures nationwide.

In making his case, Dornan noted that no effort is made in the county to determine if voters are citizens, even though citizenship is a requirement for voting. He called California’s voter registration program basically “an honor system.”

Lever confirmed that, since 1976, prospective voters have not been asked to provide proof of citizenship when registering. “You are signing a declaration that you are a citizen [under penalty of perjury],” she said. “. . . We have no authority to ask for proof of citizenship.”

Lever called the potential for fraud “highly unlikely,” and said that over the years she “has found no evidence of widespread or organized fraud.”

Losing candidates have made similar, well-publicized allegations of voter fraud in recent years, then dropped them for lack of proof. Republican Michael Huffington made such charges after losing in 1994 to Dianne Feinstein in a U.S. Senate race. So did Republican Susan Brooks, who lost a bid for Congress in 1994 to Jane Harman in Los Angeles County. They took their fraud claims to the Senate and House, respectively, then abandoned them several months later.

Dornan insisted in an interview Monday that an organized effort to register voters by a Latino citizenship group and the Democratic Party could have led to “the first case in history where a congressional election was decided by noncitizens.”

“Perhaps we should impound all these ballots, ship them to Washington, then have the House of Representatives run a giant Cray computer comparison on the entire voting list to find out if all these voters are citizens,” he said.

As recently as 1984, the result of a House election in Indiana was reversed by a Democratic majority in the House, which reviewed the ballots and designated an incumbent Democrat the winner by four votes.

Dornan said he had evidence of “two hot instances” where bounties were paid to people who signed up new voters. Although that practice is not illegal, he said it opens up the possibility that a recruiter would disregard the law.

Dornan is doing “everything he can to cling to his political life,” said John Shallman, Sanchez’s campaign manager.

“My feeling is Dornan sounds like he is preparing for a loss Wednesday and he is trying to figure out how he can manufacture a conspiracy theory because he cannot accept a decision by the voters that he has lost,” he said.

Nativo Lopez, who runs Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, a nonpartisan citizenship organization based in Santa Ana, said the group registered about 3,500 voters in the Santa Ana portion of the 46th District, and got about 8,500 people to apply for absentee ballots. He said his organization offered no bounty for registering voters.

Describing Dornan’s allegations as “unfortunate,” he said the charges are tinged with racism and could lead people to falsely conclude that Latinos “have a propensity to commit fraud.”