Congress Urged to Settle Election

Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) called Thursday on Congress to settle her contested election at its hearing in Orange County on April 19 and said Robert K. Dornan’s contention that her victory was fraudulent “falls apart when the facts are laid on the table.”

Sanchez, personally taking the offensive for the first time since taking office in January, announced the results of her campaign’s investigation into Dornan’s claim that at least 1,789 votes cast in the election are questionable. The conservative Republican has asked the House to order a new contest.

Standing beside her attorney, Wylie Aitken, Sanchez said Dornan’s case “is one of distortions, falsehoods, rumor and innuendo.”

Aitken said their $100,000 investigation determined that at most 148 votes Dornan identified could be of doubtful validity. Sanchez won by 984 votes in a contest where slightly more than 100,000 ballots were cast.

“I am confident that the true facts--presented in a fair, open and honest hearing in just 16 days--will prove conclusively that Bob Dornan’s false claims will be exposed for what they are,” she said, adding “the taxpayers and the voters deserve to have this matter resolved now.”

Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), one of three members of the House task force looking into the election challenge, said the panel would not decide the issue while in Orange County.

“There is no way mechanically or plausibly that we could make a decision on the spot,” he said. “Nor should we. It is something we should at least give a little bit of time to.”

He also expressed concern that Sanchez is trying to pressure the panel into settling the case too quickly.

“We want to wrap this up expeditiously, [but] we don’t know if we will get into new information,” he said.

Dornan’s lawyers dismissed Sanchez’s comments. Attorney Mike Schroeder said the Sanchez investigation “completely ignores” much of the evidence of noncitizen voting and other alleged irregularities in the contest.

At the news conference, Sanchez also took issue with Congress budgeting “$320,000 for this case” and said Dornan has deliberately misstated evidence “to con the Congress into wasting taxpayer funds to finance his reelection plans.”

Ney said the $320,000 was budgeted for this case and three others that have been dropped. “This is a hyped-up tactic,” he said, adding, “We might spend just $25,000.”

Sanchez’s case was supported by a presentation from Aitken, who stood with her in the lobby of his law office building and explained at length two charts illustrating their investigation. Aitken and campaign workers said Sanchez had spent $100,000 to refute Dornan’s contentions, using a dozen people who interviewed about 250 voters.

Dornan made his allegations in a brief filed Feb. 7 with Congress that is long on contentions but short on identifying people who voted improperly. Dornan’s lawyers have said they were hard pressed by the deadline Congress imposed and put together as much information as they could gather in a month.

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Aitken said the Sanchez investigation found that in categories where Dornan said he found 1,167 irregularities, they discovered just three voters who may have been unqualified. These were registered at business addresses. The other categories included those who voted twice, improperly cast absentee ballots and a discrepancy of 924 votes between the number of ballots cast and the computer record of how many people voted.

In addition, Aitken said they had identified 70 people who were noncitizens when they registered to vote on affidavits supplied by Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, a Latino rights organization. Hermandad is at the center of a state and county investigation into allegations of voter fraud in the November election.

Another 75 people Hermandad registered and who identified themselves as born in another country were not listed in federal Immigration and Naturalization Service records and could have been improperly registered, Aitken said. Those people could have been in the country illegally. Perhaps more likely, Aitken said, is that they became citizens in the 1960s before the current INS databases were developed or are missing from INS rosters because of poor record keeping, he said.

“We are talking about minuscule numbers here,” he said.

Dornan’s lawyers, however, took issue with the Sanchez team’s analysis, particularly of the Hermandad votes.

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Bill Hart, a lawyer for Dornan, said documents they subpoenaed from the district attorney’s office show that the INS has identified more than 300 voters who were noncitizens when they registered to vote and another 80 for whom the have no records.

“We have close to 400 bad votes right there, according to D.A. records,” said Schroeder.

Much of the information about noncitizen voting was developed as part of a joint investigation by the California secretary of state and the Orange County district attorney.

Last month, Secretary of State Bill Jones said the INS had confirmed that 442 people in the county had registered before becoming citizens and voted in the November election. In addition, the INS had no records for another 105 people who voted countywide, and who were not native-born American citizens, he said.

The noncitizen voting investigation was perhaps the key one for the two House Republicans on the task force who agreed to hear Dornan’s claim that the election was tainted.

Ney said that alleged voting by several hundred noncitizens especially concerned him. “When I found out that noncitizens voted, that was enough for me to say we should look into this thing. . . . There was enough smoke for us to take a look at it,” he said.