Lawyers Target Registrar Over Number of Votes Cast in Election

The Orange County registrar of voters failed to account for thousands of votes cast in the November election that sent former Congressman Robert K. Dornan to defeat, his attorneys said Thursday in papers filed with Congress.

Dornan and his lawyers said that county election workers violated several rules designed to keep people from voting twice, and that the registrar’s own set of voting records often didn’t match.

Dornan’s team said it uncovered at least 5,900 voting irregularities that Registrar Rosalyn Lever could not explain, including those found on absentee ballots, internal computer tapes and voting rosters.

The result, according to Dornan lawyer Bill Hart, is that no one can be sure who won the 46th Congressional District race. Dornan lost to challenger Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) by 984 votes.

“In Orange County, no one knows after an election who actually voted,” Hart said. “How in the world can anyone say who won this thing?”

Reached at her home late Thursday, Lever dismissed the new allegations. She said that Dornan and his lawyers were relying on inaccurate counting methods--as well as rejecting her repeated explanations.

Lever conceded that some of the 6,400 volunteer precinct officers who staff the elections might not have adhered rigidly to all county procedures. But she said her office had accounted for each of the 106,255 ballots cast in the election.

“We have answered their questions over and over,” Lever said. “The number of people who voted matched the number of ballots.”

The documents filed Thursday suggest that Dornan plans to make Lever’s ballot-counting procedures a focus of his efforts to force a new election.

Dornan has blamed his loss on what he says was widespread voter fraud. Among other things, he has charged that hundreds of noncitizens cast invalid votes.

Now, as a congressional task force prepares to convene Saturday in Santa Ana to sort out the allegations, Dornan has opened a new front.

Dornan released a 42-page summary of his new findings late Thursday, but did not include several exhibits said to total thousands of pages. Without them, the new allegations were difficult to assess.

Hart, Dornan’s lawyer, also said that precinct workers failed to adequately monitor about 1,905 voters who had requested absentee ballots before the election but who showed up at the precinct to vote on election day.

The result, Hart said, is that it is impossible to tell if they voted twice.

Hart emphasized that the anomalies he discovered in the registrar’s voting records did not necessarily constitute fraud in every case.

“We are simply identifying obvious problems with the data,” he said.