Jones: 5,087 Registrants ‘Potential Noncitizens’

Secretary of State Bill Jones announced here Monday that a comparison of voter registration and Immigration and Naturalization Service records indicates that 5,087 “potential noncitizens” were registered to vote in Orange County last year.

At the same time, however, Jones would not say how many of those suspected ineligible voters actually cast ballots countywide or in the contested 46th Congressional District race in which Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) defeated longtime Congressman Robert K. Dornan by 984 votes.

He said the numbers were too preliminary to warrant breaking them down. “We want to hone these numbers” before announcing how many of these people cast ballots or how many are in the 46th district, he said.

Jones also used the Columbus Day news conference to call for an overhaul of federal and state laws to eliminate voter fraud, including a requirement that voters provide their Social Security numbers when registering to vote.

“The apparently large number of [ineligible] people” who registered to vote in the county “shows there is a problem,” Jones said. “The question is: How do we fix it?”

In releasing his agency’s findings on voter registration drives conducted since 1992 by hundreds of largely nongovernmental groups countywide, Jones said the most egregious offender was Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, the Santa Ana-based Latino rights group that is the focus of a criminal investigation into allegations of voting fraud.

The result for Hermandad “is unique and different than for other groups,” he said.

Jones said 58% of the people who registered to vote on forms issued to Hermandad were ineligible when they registered. No other group with large numbers of registrants topped 5%, according to data released by Jones at the news conference.

Jones also declined to discuss the ongoing criminal investigation of Hermandad by the Orange County district attorney and Jones’ office. The Orange County Grand Jury two weeks ago began hearing evidence in that case.

“I am not here to discuss the criminal investigation,” he said.

Mark Rosen, attorney for Hermandad, said Hermandad is being singled out unfairly. Its registration drive “focuses on people in the Santa Ana barrio, and you are going to get a higher percentage there” of noncitizens who register to vote.

In addition, Rosen said that many who registered to vote prior to being sworn in as citizens believed they could do so if they took the oath of citizenship before election day.

“The people who registered at HMN were led to believe by INS agents that they were citizens and could register,” he said. “At final interviews, they essentially were told they are now citizens.”

Lee Godown, a spokesman for Sanchez, called the Jones’ news conference “grandstanding” based on faulty INS data.

“There are no hard numbers for the 46th, and we are interested in why he has released numbers countywide that need more analysis,” he said. “Regardless of what number he comes out with, it will be suspect because of inherent inaccuracy of INS databases and it will be meaningless.”

A spokesman for Dornan said the results “are highly encouraging” and give every indication that there were sufficient ineligible votes cast to overturn the election.

The results announced at the news conference are the first part of a comprehensive check of the citizenship of Orange County voters that Jones called for in March.

Then, Jones released information about 1,200 people registered to vote on registration cards issued to Hermandad, concluding that “a substantial number of unqualified individuals registered to vote.” He called for a complete analysis of the 1.2-million county voter file.

The bulk of the new figures released Monday came from a computer check of 378,000 Orange County residents who were registered to vote by 1,500 third-party groups, he said.

These so-called third-party registrations included voters signed up by groups ranging from the Democratic and Republican parties to the League of Women Voters and the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. About 472 of these 1,500 voter registration groups apparently registered at least one person who was not a citizen.

Jones’ latest analysis rebuts claims made by Dornan and others that large-scale registration of noncitizens was not limited to Hermandad but was widespread among certain labor unions and minority activist groups engaged in voter registration, Undersecretary of State Rob Lapsley said.

“This exonerates them,” Lapsley said.

Lapsley cautioned against drawing conclusions from the preliminary figure of 5,087 apparent noncitizen registrations, saying that the figure could decline once the INS moves from a computer comparison to the harder, more time-consuming task of checking the initial analysis against INS paper files.

The analysis released Tuesday is based on a computer comparison of INS databases and voter rolls employing dates of birth and first name/middle initial/last name matches, he said.

Included in the 5,087 registrants, he said, were about 3,000 people who voted in 1996.

Civil rights activist Art Montez called the new numbers a “partisan bingo game” without meaning, because officials continue to use notoriously suspect INS data.

“These [voters] are being victimized and villainized for political purposes under the color of law,” said Montez, past president of the Santa Ana chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens. “They have yet to verify one number.”

Jones defended the use of INS data, calling information supplied by INS on the third-party registrations “fairly reliable.” He expressed stronger confidence in the numbers released about Hermandad, which had been under study by the INS and Jones’ office for 10 months.

“We believe they are solid,” he said.

But the newly released information about Hermandad registrations was in some instances sharply at variance with the data released seven months ago.

The numbers of “Illegal Registrants . . . who voted” remained about the same, with 436 counted as voting countywide on the latest list and 442 on the list issued in March.

But the category called “Legal Registrants” dropped from 212 in March to 114 now; while the category labeled “Unknown Legal Status” went up from 105 in March to 208 now.

Neither Jones nor his staff could explain the changes.

“We have to take the information they [INS] give us,” Jones said.

Jones’s spokeswoman Beth Miller said the actual list of the 1,278 persons registered by Hermandad, with the names and immigration status of each, could not be released because of privacy concerns.

Sanchez lawyer Fred Woocher said that what the changing Hermandad numbers “really show is that they have gone backward” since the last list was issued. “They are less sure of their numbers now; the unknown has gotten larger,” he said.

“This is a cynical political ploy” to get this 5,000 figure out in the public consciousness “and has nothing to do with mustering support for voter identification at the polls.”

A good part of the news conference, however, was devoted to Jones’ campaign to develop a “common sense [voting] system” that would still function as an “honor system” at the time of registration.

Jones advocates requiring voters to present picture identification at the polls, as well as revisions in state and federal laws to require the use of Social Security numbers to allow for the authentication of a voter’s citizenship status.

In addition, Jones proposed a number of ways to stiffen penalties and redraw statutes to more easily penalize those who falsely register, attempt to falsely register or induce others to do so.

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Registration Problems

Nearly 60% of the Orange County residents registered to vote by Hermandad Mexicana Nacional may not have been citizens at the time they registered. Number and percentage of those registered to vote by various groups countywide who were apparently not citizens:

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Registration Group Percent Number Hermandad Mexicana Nacional 58.1% 742 Loretta Sanchez 2.4 12 O.C. Democratic Party 1.7 334 Secretary of State DMV 1.6 784 Southwest Voter 1.5 24 United We Stand 1.5 30 League of Women Voters 1.4 30 Reform Party 1.3 32 O.C. Republican Party 1.1 320 American Petition 0.9% 144

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Voters’ Status

Most of the Hermandad registrants who voted countywide and in the 46th Congressional district were ineligible to vote, according to the secretary of state. Citizenship status of voters whom Hermandad registered:

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Countywide 46th District (759 total) (555 total) Illegal Registrants 57% 436 55% 305 Unknown Status 28% 209 30% 164 Legal Registrants 15% 114 15% 86

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Source: California Secretary of State