INS Gives State Green Light to Verify Citizens in Disputed Race

A potential barrier to confirming the citizenship of voters in last year’s 46th Congressional District election was lifted Thursday when federal officials gave Secretary of State Bill Jones the go-ahead to complete the verification process.

Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner Doris Meissner told Jones by letter that his office can proceed because remaining federal privacy concerns can be resolved about the use and disclosure of INS information.

The House Oversight Committee, which is investigating the election, asked Jones last month to verify its finding that a “substantial” but unspecified number of noncitizens voted in the election that replaced Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) with Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove).

House Speaker Newt Gingrich, in Irvine on Thursday for a county Republican Party fund-raiser luncheon, blasted the Justice Department for citing the Privacy Act as a way to erecting barriers blocking the verification of citizenship.

Federal law requires that voters must be U.S. citizens before registering and voting.

He said Jones told him this week that Justice Department officials “stopped them from conducting interviews because of the Privacy Act.”

Jones said Thursday that his concerns were relayed to Gingrich before receiving Meissner’s letter. Because the Privacy Act doesn’t apply to Congress but does to the state agency, Jones said he needed federal assurances that he could use the House information without running afoul of the law.

“We feel much better now about being able to pursue the request by Congress” to verify citizenship status, Jones said.

He declined to say what actions would be taken to verify the citizenship information.

Richard Rogers, district director of the INS regional office in Los Angeles, has said his office already has provided citizenship information to Jones and the House through computer and hard-copy files.

He said Thursday that verifying the information is up to Jones’ office.

“We always caution when we provide electronic information that it’s not a substitute for actual verification of that person,” Roger said.

In her letter, Meissner suggested that an agreement assuring privacy be reached before additional voter information is sent to Jones’ office.

She said INS information must be “handled with all due confidentiality” and its use confined to “stated purposes related to articulable law enforcement efforts.”

Dornan, who sat next to Gingrich at the luncheon, said his attorney, California GOP Chairman Michael Schroeder, has told him, “We’re in a victory lap.”

He predicted the House will take action by the end of the month to vacate the congressional seat, triggering a special election.

Gingrich declined to confirm Dornan’s prediction.

“I’m not prepared to leap ahead to that,” he said. “I’m convinced by private briefings that there’s more than enough [evidence] of noncitizen voting to justify the investigation. I can’t get into specific details. [But] this is much more than personalities. This is about whether or not an American election was being decided by noncitizens.”

He accused Sanchez of impeding the investigation by refusing to comply with House committee subpoenas for records and information from her campaign.

Sanchez was traveling by airplane Thursday and couldn’t be reached for comment. But her campaign chairman, Wylie A. Aitken, said Sanchez joins Gingrich in wanting the election investigation resolved.

“He keeps raising the [subpoena] issue, but what do her campaign records have to do with what they’re investigating?” Aitken said. “There is no way conceivable to me that anyone had an grand scheme or design to have noncitizens vote in this election.”

He said Jones has a challenge in verifying citizenship status because INS records are notoriously inaccurate.

For example, he said, Jones announced months ago that 303 possible noncitizen voters had been identified from a list of 1,160 people registered by Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, a Santa Ana-based immigrant-rights group under investigation by Jones and the Orange County district attorney’s office for registering noncitizens.

A door-to-door follow-up by the Sanchez campaign found rampant errors in the information, Aitken said.

Gingrich urged passage Thursday of a bill that would require voters to provide their Social Security numbers on registration affidavits. The numbers would be available only to elections officials for the purposes of verifying voter eligibility.

In other remarks Thursday, Gingrich told about 400 Republicans in attendance he supports a measure being qualified for the state ballot that would require written permission by union members before their dues could be used for political purposes.

The measure is sponsored by Orange County GOP activists James Righeimer, Mark Bucher and Frank Ury.