State Orders Wider Probe of O.C. Vote Fraud Allegations

Based on evidence that alleged voter fraud at a Latino rights agency is more widespread than previously reported, Secretary of State Bill Jones on Friday ordered a review of Orange County’s 1.3 million residents registered to vote in last year’s general election.

Jones’ action stems from a new audit by his office and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service of voter registration cards distributed by Hermandad Mexicana Nacional. The Santa Ana immigrant rights group is at the heart of an investigation by his office and the Orange County district attorney into alleged voter fraud.

Of the 1,160 people registered to vote on Hermandad-issued cards, 721 apparently had not completed the citizenship process before they registered, Jones said. Of that number, investigators contend, 442 unlawfully voted in the Nov. 5 election, in which 874,017 votes were cast countywide.

“I have concluded that substantial probable cause now exists to examine the integrity of the entire Orange County voter registration file in order to fully and accurately assess the extent of unlawful registrations . . . and to identify the sources of such unlawful registrations,” Jones wrote in a letter Friday to the INS in Los Angeles.

Jones has cited state statutes as giving him the authority to order the review of registrants. But on a practical level, he needs the cooperation of the INS to determine the citizenship status of those who registered for the past election.

Hermandad officials have repeatedly denied helping any noncitizens to register or vote, although they acknowledge that some overzealous students taking citizenship classes may have done so on their own.

Mark Rosen, Hermandad’s attorney, said the “numbers sound highly overstated.”

“I don’t take at face value any of the figures” being reported by the media or official agencies, he said. “If and when we have to, we will do our own evaluation of each registration that they claim is somehow impaired.”

The new numbers of improper registrations and votes are higher than earlier estimates. The district attorney’s office said in an affidavit filed in January that 227 people registered to vote on Hermandad registration cards while in the process of applying for citizenship.

Some of these people voted. But even if they were naturalized by Election Day, their votes would be invalid because they were not citizens when they registered, according to the secretary of state.

In his letter to Richard Rogers, Los Angeles district director of the INS, Jones cites state and federal law as the basis for his request.

Reached Friday, Rogers said he had received Jones’ letter and would cooperate. The only problem he envisioned would be how to accomplish the review.

“I am going to have to check with Washington, but I see it as a legitimate request under the law enforcement exemption” that permits the INS to share records with other agencies, he said. Rogers said he expected to take the matter up on Monday with headquarters.

Eric Andrus, chief spokesman for the INS in Washington, cautioned that INS records on individuals are protected by law. He said the request made Friday would have to be reviewed and that the public interest in knowing the information would have to be weighed against the privacy of the individuals.

The result of the voter-roll analysis is sure to become a key element in the challenge mounted in Orange County by defeated Rep. Robert K. Dornan, who lost Nov. 5 to Democrat Loretta Sanchez by 984 votes. Dornan has asked Congress to order a new election in the 46th District, claiming that he was primarily ousted by the votes of noncitizens. And Jones said he expects to be called as a witness in an upcoming congressional subcommittee hearing on the matter.

Because of his close ties to the GOP, Jones, who once served as Republican caucus leader in the state Assembly, is likely to draw criticism from some quarters for ordering the review.

But on Friday, Jones denied that his order was an attempt to assist a fellow Republican. “It comes back to whether the system as currently operating is adequate to ensure the integrity of the system,” Jones said.

Depending on the outcome of the Orange County review, Jones said he would consider using the same technique elsewhere in the state to safeguard voter registration, which is conducted under an honor system in California.

Meanwhile, immigration law attorneys and immigrant rights advocates decried the secretary of state’s order as potentially costly and unwarranted. They said it unfairly targets new citizens and invades their privacy.

“With the major budget problems that this state is confronting overall, and particularly around issues of federal welfare reform, it seems like an enormous waste of resources to be engaged in this sort of fishing expedition,” said Robert Rubin, deputy director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco.

Lucas Guttentag, director of the ACLU’s immigrant rights project in San Francisco, said the search would prove fruitless because INS citizenship records are often unreliable.

“It smacks of an incredible intrusion of privacy,” Guttentag sad. “Time and time again, it has been demonstrated that INS records are notoriously inaccurate and incomplete.”

Guttentag and others said that problems with INS records could ensnare innocent people. And some feared that the INS would target those with Latino names.

“I would be extremely concerned that Latino voters would be singled out,” said Cecilia Munoz, deputy vice president for policy at the National Council of La Raza, a Latino rights organization in Washington, D.C. “You have the potential of discriminating against native-born people.”

But Jones said the INS review would be “one piece in a comprehensive” check of the voter file, which also would include his office working with the Orange County registrar to weed out duplicate registrations, people who vote unlawfully from business addresses, fictitious registrations and other irregularities.

Jones said the number of fraudulent registrations connected to Hermandad is “the biggest in [recent state] history” and he is concerned that others could exploit the same weaknesses in the system.

“It is my hope that we won’t find a major problem . . . but if we find a major problem . . . there is probable cause to look at the remainder of California,” he said.

The secretary of state’s review of the voter file would be the most thorough test of Dornan’s claims of voter fraud and could provide him with information he has sought unsuccessfully to obtain from the INS by subpoena.

James Sweeney, chief counsel to Jones, said he has found no precedent for a state official asking the INS to run a voter file comparison for a whole county against immigration records, but he said it is “very clear that we have the authority.”

Jones, who served in the state Assembly for a dozen years representing Fresno and was Republican caucus leader in 1991-92, was elected secretary of state in 1994. He renounced Thursday an effort by agricultural interests to back him in next year’s GOP primary for a U.S. Senate seat and said he wants to run again for secretary of state.

In his letter to Rogers, Jones said he intends to start the review within 30 days. He has asked to make a “computerized comparison” of the Orange County registration files and the INS databases.

“There is simply no other feasible means of verifying citizenship status. Without such a verification, criminal investigation of voter registration fraud and election fraud felony cases would be virtually impossible,” Jones said. “Moreover, there is no other means of assessing the degree to which the registration of unqualified noncitizens has corrupted the Orange County file.”

Officials in Jones’ office said a comparison of the voter file with INS databases in Washington could be done via a computer match program relatively quickly. The check of the 1,160 names of people registered to vote on Hermandad-issued cards, however, took analysts almost six weeks because it was done by hand.

A spokesman for Jones said experts in his office believe it would take about a day to write the necessary computer program and two days for the 1.3 million names on the voter file to be compared with INS records.

The secretary of state’s review did not break down countywide voter registration records into congressional districts. It was not possible to determine how many of the allegedly unlawful registrations or votes took place in the 46th Congressional District.

The first complaint that Hermandad may have aided a noncitizen to register was made in mid-October by the Orange County registrar of voters to the district attorney’s office. State and local investigations, however, did not gain steam until mid-November, after Dornan filed his complaints with state and local authorities claiming the Latino rights group had encouraged noncitizens to register and vote.

In late December, The Times disclosed that 18 resident immigrants who received voter registration forms while they were students in citizenship classes at Hermandad had acknowledged registering to vote before being naturalized. Fifteen of them said they voted in the Nov. 5 election.

Times staff writers Nancy Cleeland and Dexter Filkins contributed to this report.