INS Costs in Voting Probe Reach $150,000

The Immigration and Naturalization Service has spent more than $150,000 investigating alleged voter fraud in last November’s election in Orange County, according to information released Wednesday by the agency and a congressional committee that ordered the probe.

However, the cost and the more than 4,000 hours of investigative work spent finding out how many noncitizens may have voted in the 46th Congressional District--where the fraud is suspected--is incomplete, partly because of lost paper records and outdated information on the agency’s computers.

Because of the unreliability of the information to date, INS Commissioner Doris Meissner warned in a letter to the House Oversight Committee that there are “limitations on the relevance of INS data” turned over to the panel this week.

All indications are that it will ultimately be up to the House panel to determine who was an ineligible voter in the race that led to the election of Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) by a 984-vote margin over former Republican Congressman Robert K. Dornan.

The committee is considering Dornan’s request for a new election because of alleged voting by noncitizens.

During a congressional hearing on Wednesday on a separate matter, a Justice Department official noted the agency’s extraordinary effort to comply with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena.

“We have already spent $150,000 in this endeavor,” said David Ogden, associate deputy attorney general, during testimony before the House Immigration Subcommittee. “This is a very, very expensive and time-consuming process.”

In her letter to the committee, Meissner also noted the cost and time spent on the Orange County probe ordered by the committee, which required a manual check of records in about two dozen locations across the country.

In a rush to meet a committee-imposed deadline, the INS on Tuesday turned over work sheets of 3,257 alleged noncitizens at the time of the election, out of a total 4,023 on INS computers that appeared to match names of registered voters in the congressional district.

Of those checked by hand, the INS’ Western Service Center in Laguna Niguel believes that as many as 300 to 500 records may be inaccurate because naturalization certificates may be in “temporary files” that have yet to be located, Meissner reported to the committee.

“Further field investigation will be desirable to determine whether an apparent match between California [voter registration rolls] and INS records pertains to two different individuals,” Meissner said.

For example, one of the records turned over to the panel by the INS belonged to a woman on the INS computer whose name, including middle initial, and date of birth matched a registered voter in the Sanchez district, according to a Democrat who viewed the file. But the paper record showed the woman was naturalized in Michigan in 1959, before the INS began electronic storage of its records.

Steve Jost, Sanchez’s chief of staff, said the INS research is in danger of being misused.

“For those who are not old enough to remember McCarthyism, we are about to get a re-education,” Jost said, referring to the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who gained national publicity through Senate hearings in which he erroneously identified pro-Communist “sympathizers” during the 1950s.

“The numbers do not justify the witch hunt. And to prove their theory [of excessive voter fraud], Republicans are going to have to go knocking on the doors of thousands of innocent people,” Jost added.

Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Bakersfield), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, decided not to respond to the information turned over by the INS until Republicans have had a chance to study it.

“At this stage of the investigation, it is completely misleading to be citing specific numbers of voters. Once we have completed all of our work, we will make our findings public,” Thomas said.