Sanchez Aide: Hermandad Sought Funds to Get Votes

In sworn, written testimony, the former campaign manager for Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) said a leader of the immigrant rights group Hermandad Mexicana Nacional asked the campaign for money in exchange for persuading voters to cast their ballots for Sanchez.

John Shallman, the campaign manager, also said that he was led to believe that Hermandad’s Nativo Lopez would direct people to vote for then-incumbent Rep. Robert K. Dornan if the campaign refused.

Lopez made the request several weeks before last November’s election and was turned down, according to Shallman, who was responding to questions from a House of Representatives task force investigating allegations of vote fraud.

Lopez said Shallman’s allegations were “preposterous and insulting,” and denied ever having called him. “Hermandad Mexicana Nacional has never been for sale,” he said. “We don’t endorse candidates.”

Shallman’s testimony, released Tuesday, was the first disclosure of the unusual demand he contended was made by Hermandad, a nonprofit agency that ran an aggressive voter registration drive last year. Hermandad is being investigated by the district attorney’s office for allegedly registering noncitizens to vote.

Shallman also said Arturo Montez, a Latino community leader who was then the Santa Ana president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, made an initial call asking for money for Hermandad.

“You guys better get some money to Nativo before Dornan does,” Shallman testified Montez told him in October 1996.

Then Lopez himself called within the same month, Shallman said. “He indicated that he wielded influence with many voters and that if we would retroactively subsidize his efforts, he might be inclined to encourage these voters to vote for Ms. Sanchez,” Shallman said.

“From my previous conversation with Mr. Montez, I viewed this as an indication that if we did not support Mr. Lopez’[s] campaign financially, he would be inclined to encourage these voters to support Mr. Dornan.”

Montez also denied Shallman’s assertions, saying “I never, never said that Nativo Lopez or anybody else in the Latino community would support Dornan if they didn’t give us money.”

Montez conceded he asked Shallman for money in the last weeks of the campaign, but said it was for food and refreshments for precinct walkers supporting Democratic candidates.

“Everybody hit everybody up for money at that time,” he said. “Here we were sending people out to walk the last two weekends, and we didn’t have a penny to buy Cokes. I think Mr. Shallman just isn’t used to barrio politics.”

Dornan lost the election by 984 votes, then immediately contended the contest was tainted by voter fraud. The task force began looking into his charges nearly a year ago, but has yet to reach a conclusion about whether to overturn the election.

Hermandad workers and volunteers registered more than 1,000 voters in Orange County, including many who had taken citizenship classes at its Santa Ana offices.

California Secretary of State Bill Jones, whose office also is investigating the group, has said that 742 of those who registered to vote were not yet citizens, based on information supplied by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

He also said 305 of those ineligible voters cast ballots in the 46th Congressional District, now represented by Sanchez.

Sanchez has disputed those figures, and said INS data are notoriously unreliable. Volunteers for Sanchez questioned 74 of the 305 allegedly illegal voters, and found that 56 were actually citizens at the time they registered, she has said.

In a series of questions sent to members of the Sanchez campaign this month, the task force appeared to seek a link between Sanchez and Hermandad.

Sanchez and those in her campaign have consistently denied having any connection with the group. In fact, Sanchez testified in April that Lopez refused to support her after she won the Democratic primary because of his long-standing relationship with Dornan.

Shallman, a Los Angeles-based campaign consultant, said he never spoke publicly about the request for money before because he was never directly asked. His disclosure came in response to the question: “Did you . . . have any communications with Nativo Lopez . . . regarding voter registration projects or efforts during the 1995-1996 election cycle?”

In an interview Tuesday, he said he turned Lopez down because, “You have to have control of a campaign. You have to know where your money is going to go. And 10 times out of 10, people who have approached me have been unable or incompetent to execute their program. And I have no reason to believe this time would have been any different.”

Shallman and Sanchez’s campaign chairman, Wylie A. Aitken, said the committee should now ask Dornan if he heard from Lopez after Shallman refused the offer.

Montez said Lopez had supported Dornan until about six years ago, during a time when Dornan backed policies favorable to immigrants. He said that support faded when Dornan began espousing anti-immigrant views.

In the past election, Montez said, “Nativo didn’t endorse anybody, and neither did I.”

Shallman’s disclosure was essentially the only new information in nearly 40 pages of responses to task force interrogatories by Sanchez, Aitken and Shallman.

In fact, in a statement preceding his answers, Aitken said the task force had made little progress after nearly a year of investigation, and claimed its members had unfairly characterized Sanchez as being uncooperative.

Aitken said Sanchez gave all necessary information at a field hearing the task force held in Santa Ana in April. “Six months later, the questions are the same and the answers are the same,” he said.

Also contributing to this report was Times correspondent Jeff Kass.

* HE’LL TRY AGAIN: Robert K. Dornan files to run for Congress in 1998. B1