Experts Doubt INS Able to Verify All O.C. Voters

A day after California Secretary of State Bill Jones said he wanted to verify the citizenship of more than 1 million Orange County voters, immigration experts on Saturday raised doubts about whether federal authorities could complete such a monumental task.

Some experts said that Immigration and Naturalization Service records have proved so unreliable that native-born and naturalized citizens could be ensnared in such a search.

“Asking INS to determine the citizenship status of a million people would be a nightmare,” said Mark Rosenbaum, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. “I would have more confidence in a Ouija board.”

The debate over the citizenship verification followed Jones’ announcement Friday of even more widespread voting improprieties surrounding the Santa Ana Latino rights organization Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, which has been at the center of a criminal investigation.

Jones found that of 1,160 people who signed up to vote on Hermandad-issued registration cards, 721 were not yet citizens. Of those, 442 voted in the November election.

The latest numbers were seized upon by former Rep. Robert K. Dornan, who contends that fraudulent voting by noncitizens was responsible for his loss last November to Democrat Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove). Sanchez won by 984 votes.

No charges have been filed, and Hermandad officials have denied wrongdoing.

Dornan on Saturday praised Jones’ request to search the entire county voter registration list. He predicted that the results would compel the House of Representatives to overturn Sanchez’s victory and hold another election.

“Checking the whole county is good for fairness, good for the county and good for the once-and-future Congressman Bob Dornan,” he said.

Opposing Views on Partisanship

A spokesman for Sanchez, meanwhile, denounced Jones’ proposal and said it would tar law-abiding citizens. Steve Jost, Sanchez’s chief of staff, also accused Jones, a Republican, of playing politics.

“This is a dangerous, ominous and partisan abuse of the power of government,” Jost said. “It is ‘Big Brother’ overkill, which puts more than a million taxpaying Americans under suspicion without justifiable cause.”

In a letter sent Friday to INS District Director Richard Rogers in Los Angeles, Jones asked the INS to compare a list of Orange County’s 1.3 million voters to INS immigration records. That, Jones said, would determine how many noncitizens voted in the November election.

“This isn’t about putting people in jail because they made a mistake,” Jones said Saturday. “This is about making changes so that people who intentionally seek to defraud understand there is a price to pay when they are caught.”

Questions about the magnitude of conducting such a search, however, surfaced Saturday as state and federal officials pondered the difficulty of reviewing more than a million records.

David Gray, chief of information technology for the secretary of state, predicted it would take about three days to write a computer program and run the county voter lists through the INS databases. But his boss, Rob Lapsley, Jones’ chief of staff, said it would take longer--he couldn’t predict how long--for further refinements to ensure 100% accuracy.

INS spokeswoman Virginia Kice said the information would be very difficult, if not impossible, to provide and said the agency had been caught off guard by Jones’ request.

“We’ll sit down on Monday morning and see what they’ve given us,” she said. “We’ll need technical people involved, we’ll need to look at the legal issues. What are the implications? And what is the feasibility of even getting this information?”

Sheer Volume of Search Daunting

Kice and other experts pointed out several potential obstacles in trying to verify the citizenship status of every Orange County voter.

Among them:

* The sheer size of INS databases. Jones asked for information from five INS databases containing millions of names of legal immigrants and naturalized citizens. One million immigrants became U.S. citizens nationwide last year alone. To check the Orange County voter list, INS would have to search all of the databases in the entire country.

* Incompatible information. Names on voter registration lists often differ from those in INS files. For example, immigrants often use two last names on INS records, but often only one on their voter registration card. Many names are common. Addresses may change. However, matching county and INS lists would be made simpler because both contain dates of birth.

* Poor record-keeping by INS. Several immigration attorneys said agency records are notoriously unreliable, and in some cases, have led to unjustified detentions.

* Many INS records are still not computerized. Kice, the INS spokeswoman, acknowledged that the agency’s records are not flawless. “We have made substantial progress in recent years in cleaning up our databases, but there are still gaps,” she said. “There is some validity to what [critics] are saying.”

* The inability to catch people who lied about their birthplace on registration forms. The INS does not keep records on U.S.-born citizens, so anyone born in another country who claimed otherwise when registering most likely would not be checked.

* Possible legal impediments to turning over information. All information on individual immigrants is protected by the Privacy Act, which requires evidence of overwhelming public need before they can be released.

* Cost. Because such an investigation is unprecedented, the potential costs are unclear. If any of the information sought by Jones has to be manually checked, the costs could be quite substantial.

Many immigration lawyers and experts around the country agreed that Jones’s request would require time, money and legions of workers.

“It’s unprecedented and I think that Jones is taking the taxpayers for a ride,” said Chris Sautter, an attorney with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who has extensive experience with vote recounts.

Sautter said the number of unlawful votes discovered in the Dornan-Sanchez race so far is not unusual for an election this size and does not warrant the broad investigation sought by Jones. About 100,000 ballots were cast in that race.

“It’s obvious from the circumstances that voters were operating in good faith,” he said. “I’ve yet to hear an example of what one would characterize as classic voter fraud.”

Critics See Ploy to Pick on Latinos

Others labeled the proposal a thinly disguised Republican effort to smother Latino political strength, whose rapid rise threatens the GOP across California, many believe.

“They saw a real threat to their domination, particularly in Orange County . . . with the election of a Hispanic woman, in their land, taking down their guy,” said Fred Woocher, Sanchez’s attorney.

Mark Rosen, an attorney for Hermandad, called Jones’ proposal “racist and partisan.”

“It’s picking on Hispanics, which is something Republicans have been engaged in for years,” he said.

Several people applauded Jones’ proposal, saying it could help blunt what they described as a tide of fraudulent voting by noncitizens.

“Regardless of what people might think of ‘B-1 Bob’ Dornan, every single law-abiding voter is indebted to him for forcing national attention on this problem,” said Barbara Coe, chairwoman of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform and a prime backer of Proposition 187, which would deny public services to illegal immigrants.

Harold Ezell, former INS regional commissioner and chairman of Americans for Responsible Immigration, said Jones’ proposal could help stem a glut of illegal voting.

Ezell said that past efforts to investigate voter fraud failed because neither the secretary of state nor the INS would cooperate. He pointed to the case of Mike Huffington, the unsuccessful 1994 Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, who blamed his narrow loss on voting by illegal immigrants.

Huffington spent thousands of dollars investigating, but he never proved his contention.

“It’s kind of refreshing to have a secretary of state who is willing to do this,” Ezell said. “If you are an American citizen, you should have nothing to hide.”

Republicans have alleged that Hermandad officials intentionally sought to sign up noncitizens as part of an effort to recruit more minority voters--who the Republicans presume to be mostly Democrats.

“The implications of the investigations to date extend far beyond the 46th Congressional District,” said Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach).

Rep. Ron Packard (R-Oceanside) said the voter fraud evidence gathered so far justifies further investigation.

“Our Constitution mandates that only citizens can elect their representatives and leaders,” he said. “If we don’t make every effort to uphold the laws, then we make a mockery of them. This issue is not about [political] party. It is not about winners and losers. It’s about what’s right.”

The Orange County district attorney’s office is conducting a criminal investigation of Hermandad, and in court papers alleged that 227 noncitizens registered to vote on cards provided by Hermandad.

Chief Assistant Dist. Atty. Maury Evans declined to comment Saturday, saying the investigation is continuing.

Cecilia Munoz, deputy vice president of the National Council of La Raza, a Latino rights organization, said she doesn’t mind if the federal government conducts a voter fraud investigation. But she said she worries that such an investigation could quickly turn into an anti-immigrant frenzy.

“The people doing this need to be very careful that this does not turn into a hysterical witch hunt,” she said.

Mai Cong, president of Vietnamese Community of Orange County, a Santa Ana-based social services agency that registered several hundred voters in the last election, deemed Jones’ request “a waste of time for everyone.”

“I think this will have an impact on discouraging people from participating in the political process,” Cong said. “It’s a waste of time, it’s a waste of money.”

Also contributing to this report were Times staff writers Gebe Martinez and Lily Dizon.