INS to Aid in Election Probe in O.C.

The Orange County district attorney’s office has enlisted the aid of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in investigating allegations of voting by noncitizens in the Nov. 5 election, officials said Friday.

INS spokeswoman Virginia Kice said the federal agency is cooperating fully in the investigation, but declined to offer specifics. The INS, which keeps records of the immigration status of noncitizens, has provided information to assist local prosecutors scrutinizing Orange County voter rolls for evidence of fraud, other sources said.

Under state law, it is a felony for someone who is not a citizen to vote or register to vote and noncitizens who do may be deported, officials said. Investigators will also try to determine if noncitizens were persuaded by others to register and vote.

Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi described the investigation Friday 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 of them cast ballots in the central Orange County district where Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) 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 nearly 12 years.

Michael Schroeder, an attorney for Dornan and vice chairman of the California Republican Party, said The Times’ report “confirms what Bob Dornan has been saying for some time, that this election was tampered with. 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 Lopez, successfully ran for 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 eagerness by noncitizens to cast their first ballots.

Capizzi declined to estimate the number of noncitizens who might have voted, or discuss whether Hermandad or its employees are targets of his office’s investigation.

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 of a family emergency. His daughter, Robin 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 [the allegations of] fraud.”

On Friday, Sanchez’s campaign chairman and her attorney sought to distance her victory from any possible evidence of 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 could not be reached for comment Friday.

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

Times staff writers Matt Lait and Anne-Marie O’Connor contributed to this story.