INS Vows to Try to Meet Request on Registrations

Federal immigration officials said Monday they will try to meet a request by Secretary of State Bill Jones to compare Orange County’s 1.3 million voter registrations against federal immigration records to determine if widespread voter fraud exists.

Richard Rogers, Immigration and Naturalization Service district director, said the major stumbling block would be the sheer size of the effort. But he also added that his agency wants to be certain that the review is being done for legitimate law enforcement reasons.

“I was assured of that on Friday” by the secretary of state’s staff, Rogers said, adding that INS lawyers had concurred. “It appears on the surface to conform to the law enforcement exemption” of the Privacy Act, he said.

Citing evidence of alleged voter fraud at the offices of a Latino-rights organization, Jones asked Rogers on Friday to help in an unprecedented review of Orange County’s voters.

Jones’ request was the result of an audit which found that 721 of the 1,160 people who registered to vote on cards issued to Hermandad Mexicana Nacional were not citizens at the time. Of that number, 442 unlawfully cast ballots in the Nov. 5 election, Jones said.

He said the number of allegedly fraudulent registrations connected to Hermandad Mexicana Nacional is “the biggest in [recent state] history” and expressed concern about the integrity of the voting system.

Attorneys for Hermandad have disputed Jones’s findings and have denied any wrongdoing.

Jones said the countywide voter registration review would be used primarily to determine if the system is open to fraud. He said he would not prosecute anyone who mistakenly registered improperly, but he wants those “who intentionally seek to defraud [to] understand there is a price to pay when they are caught.”

Latino rights organizations, civil libertarians and others have criticized the proposed review, saying it would be fraught with possible violations of privacy rights of law-abiding citizens. Some have described INS records as shoddy and unreliable.

A number of Democrats also have attacked the plan as being partisan, and said it seems to be designed to help the effort of ousted Republican Rep. Robert K. Dornan, who is challenging in Congress his loss in November to Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove). Jones is a Republican.

“Mr. Jones now bears a heavy obligation to more than a million voters in five congressional districts that their fundamental right to privacy is protected,” said Steve Jost, chief of staff to Sanchez. “The congresswoman regrets that the people throughout Orange County need to be put through this process to vindicate her election victory. Any effort to ensure the integrity of the election process is worthwhile, so long as the Constitution is not trampled in the process.”

Eric Andrus, a spokesman for the INS in Washington, noted that the request for a countywide check was “unprecedented in its scope, but the INS every day shares information with law enforcement on a wide range of issues.”

INS officials in Washington and California discussed Jones’ request on Monday and pondered the logistics of the undertaking.

“That is exactly where we are,” Rogers said. The state and federal agencies would “try for an answer by the end of the week” as to how the review can be done by computer because any other method would not be feasible, he said.

Rogers noted that state and local agencies, including the Department of Motor Vehicles and social service agencies, already make queries of the INS computer databases.

“This would be an elaborate version of that,” he said.

Reached late Monday, Rob Lapsley, chief of staff to Jones, said he had yet to talk with Rogers about the INS decision. “We look forward to working with them,” he said. “This will take unparalleled cooperation between the two agencies.”

Lapsley said he believed the cost of the review “would not be huge,” but declined to be more specific.

“We believe the [electronic comparison] can be done,” he said. “We are not saying it will come off of one computer run, but we will devote the staff and the resources necessary to check it to the greatest degree of accuracy possible.”