INS Assisting Capizzi in Voter Fraud Inquiry

The Orange County district attorney’s office has enlisted the aid of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to investigate allegations of voting by noncitizens first raised by Rep. Robert K. Dornan after he lost the Nov. 5 election, officials said Friday.

INS spokeswoman Virginia Kice said the federal agency is cooperating fully with the investigation but declined to offer specifics.

The INS, which keeps records on the immigration status of noncitizens, has provided information to assist local prosecutors scrutinizing Orange County voter rolls for evidence of fraud, other sources said. Investigators also will try to determine if noncitizens were persuaded by others to register and vote.

Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi on Friday described the investigation as “serious.” If noncitizens voted in the election, he said, “we will find them. To my knowledge, [investigators] may already have found them.”

The Times interviewed 19 people this week who said they had not yet become citizens when they registered to vote with the help of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, a Santa Ana-based Latino civil rights organization. All cast ballots in the central Orange County district where Dornan was defeated by Democrat Loretta Sanchez in one of the most closely watched congressional races of the year.

Dornan, who lost the race by 984 votes, was accused of racism when he blamed his defeat on voting by noncitizens in the heavily immigrant district where he held a seat for 12 years.

The Times’ report “confirms what Bob Dornan has been saying for some time, that this election was tampered with,” said Michael Schroeder, an attorney for Dornan and vice chairman of the California Republican Party. “The only question now is whether or not it can be proven the tampering rose to such a level that it fixed the election.”

Hermandad registered at least 1,357 people countywide in the months leading up to the election in which the group’s executive director, Nativo V. Lopez, won a seat on the Santa Ana Unified School District board.

Lopez, who declined to comment Friday, has attributed the voting by noncitizens who registered at his Santa Ana headquarters to misunderstandings and an eagerness on behalf of those wanting to cast their first ballots.

Capizzi declined to estimate the potential numbers of noncitizens who might have voted, or discuss whether any person or group is a target of his office’s investigation.

“We are not going to speculate where it might go and prejudge the evidence,” Capizzi said. “We will gather evidence and evaluate and determine what the criminal implications might be, just as we have in countless cases over the years.”

Under state law, it is a felony for someone who is not a citizen to vote or register to vote. Noncitizens who do so may be deported, officials said.

Prosecutors began a voter fraud investigation last month when Dornan filed complaints of voting irregularities with the district attorney and the secretary of state’s office.

On Thursday, Dornan also took the unusual step of contesting the election results with the U.S. House of Representatives.

Dornan could not be reached for comment Friday because he was attending a family emergency, said his daughter, Robin Griffin. Griffin said her father “is not calling for the House of Representatives to seat [him] but for them to rule the race invalid so there would be a new election based on fraud.”

She also lashed out at Lopez.

“We also feel a majority of these people were duped and Nativo [Lopez] is going to get caught without our doing anything else,” Griffin said.

On Friday, Sanchez’s campaign chairman and her attorney sought to distance her victory from possible voter fraud.

“This appears to be a situation where people were given misinformation. It is a far cry from allegations of massive voting fraud that Dornan has been recklessly throwing around,” said Fredric D. Woocher, an attorney for Sanchez. Sanchez also could not be reached for comment Friday.

“I know very little about Nativo Lopez and his organization,” said Wylie A. Aitken, Sanchez’s campaign chairman. “They were not in any way involved or a player in the Loretta Sanchez campaign.”

Aitken said the number of noncitizen votes found was “minuscule” compared to the overall number of ballots cast. Some 106,000 ballots were cast in the 46th Congressional District.

Others in the Latino community Friday said they were surprised by the allegations.

“This has momentarily shocked us,” said Amin David, who runs Los Amigos of Orange County, a Latino activist group. “It’s sad and certainly an investigation is in order.” However, David said that based on his long-standing association with Hermandad, he doesn’t believe there was any intentional wrongdoing.

But Harold Ezell, former western regional commissioner of the INS and an architect of the anti-illegal immigration initiative Proposition 187, said that the revelations that 19 people were able to register though they were noncitizens “points out clearly that our voting system is broken.”

“You should not be able to exercise the most precious privilege that we as citizens have just by walking in and smiling,” he said. “We should have a system of checking who is voting at the time they are registering and voting. You don’t have to show anything to do either one, and to me it is outrageous that this is true on the threshold of the 21st century.”

Public attention regarding the allegations of voter fraud has centered on the Dornan-Sanchez race because it is the only Orange County race still being contested.

Dornan has raised a variety of voter fraud allegations, but it is unclear how those charges might affect the outcome of the race.

Woocher, an elections law attorney, said Dornan faces an uphill battle: He must first identify fraudulent voters and then show they voted for Sanchez, a difficult task because the ballot process is secret.

Schroeder, however, maintains that if he can show that from 1,500 to 2,000 ballots should not have been counted, that should be sufficient to throw the results into question before the House of Representatives.

Also contributing to this report were Times staff writers Matt Lait, Janet Wilson, Nancy Cleeland and Anne-Marie O’Connor.