Bid to Verify All O.C. Voters Assailed, Praised

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 Saturday raised doubts about whether federal authorities could complete such a monumental task.

Some experts said 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 Rosenberg, 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 verifications followed Jones’ announcement Friday of widespread voting improprieties surrounding the Santa Ana-based 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 results added fuel to claims by former Rep. Robert K. Dornan that fraudulent voting by illegal immigrants and noncitizens was responsible for his loss in November to Democratic upstart Loretta Sanchez of Garden Grove.

Those charges have not been proved in court, and Hermandad officials have denied wrongdoing.

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.

Dornan on Saturday praised Jones’ request to search the entire county voting 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.

A spokesman for Sanchez denounced Jones’ proposal and said it would tar law-abiding citizens. The spokesman, Steve Jost, also accused Jones, a Republican elected official, 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 federal agency to compare a list of Orange County’s 1.3 million registered 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 change so that people who intentionally seek to defraud understand there is a price to pay when they are caught.”

But questions about the sheer magnitude of conducting such a search surfaced Saturday.

David Gray, chief of information technology for the secretary of state, said it would take about three days to comb INS records. But he seemed one of the few people who thought that the proposed search would be so simple.

INS spokeswoman Virginia Kice said that the information would be very difficult, if not impossible, to provide, and that 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?”

Kice and other experts pointed out many potential obstacles in trying to verify the citizenship status of every Orange County voter, including:

* 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 citizens last year in the United States. To check the Orange County voter list, the INS would have to search all of its databases in the 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 usually only one on their voter registration card. Many names are common. Addresses may change.

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

Kice 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 on registration forms. Only those registered voters who said they were born in another country would be checked against INS records, because the agency does not keep records on U.S.-born citizens.

* Cost. Because such an investigation is unprecedented, the potential costs are unclear.

Immigration lawyers and experts around the country echoed Kice’s remarks. They said Jones’ request would be a vast undertaking that 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 bad votes found countywide to date is not unusual for an election this size and does not warrant the broad investigation sought by Jones.

“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.”

Others said the proposal was a thinly disguised Republican tool to smother Latino political strength, whose rapid rise threatens the GOP across California.

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 stop what they described as a tide of fraudulent voting by noncitizens and illegal immigrants.

“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, which sponsored Proposition 187, which would deny many 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.

“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.”