O.C. Registrar Refuses State Request on Voters

Orange County’s top elections official has declined a state request to remove the names of 743 people from the voter rolls, saying she has not seen enough evidence to show they were not citizens when they registered to vote before the 1996 election.

“We don’t have any proof that they registered improperly,” said Registrar Rosalyn Lever.

The 743 were among 1,278 people registered to vote before the 1996 election by the Latino rights group Hermandad Mexicana Nacional. Virtually all were scrutinized as part of an investigation last year by the Orange County district attorney’s office that concluded with the grand jury issuing no indictments but identifying about 630 ineligible voters.

The request to remove the names from the rolls was made by Secretary of State Bill Jones, the state’s chief elections officer.

Lever is not disputing whether the people were legally registered or not; she is saying that without direct evidence in hand, she is barred by state and federal law from removing voters. An aide to Jones said that the office will respond by coming up with a new policy by next week.

“These names are coming off the file and they should come off the file,” said state spokeswoman Beth Miller, adding that all 743 names had been “triple checked” by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Jones’ office has temporarily placed a hold on the purging process, in part because it is unprecedented. There is no statewide policy on purging people who registered before becoming citizens and it needs to be dealt with “very carefully,” Miller said.

Lever and Jones have been discussing for some months the proper procedures for handling the hundreds of people who apparently registered before becoming citizens in Orange County. There are 1.2 million registered voters in Orange County.

Earlier this year, the two offices had weighed sending letters to the 743 people believed to have registered improperly. One letter would have gone to the 372 people the INS has identified as having registered before becoming citizens, Miller said. It would have invited these people to reapply now that they are citizens.

The other letter would have been sent to the 371 whom the INS identified as not being citizens as of last fall, Miller said.

In both cases, those who did not answer the letters would have had their registrations canceled.

Several representatives of Latino and Asian American communities have criticized the plan to send the letters. Others questioned the reliability of INS lists that were used to identify noncitizen registrants.

Bonnie Tang, staff attorney at the Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California, said the letters “would have a definite chilling effect on voter participation” if sent mistakenly to a naturalized citizen.

Antonio Gonzalez, president of Southwest Voter Registration Education Project based in Montebello, said, “All you need is a certain percentage of people who are native born to mistakenly receive such a notice and the public relations disaster will far outweigh benefits for the secretary of state.”

Any effort to remove people from the rolls would also likely draw scrutiny from the Department of Justice under the National Voting Rights Act, said voting rights lawyers.

Jones had sought to have Lever remove the 743, in part, by asserting that the registrations were not governed by the federal law because as “defective” registrations they are “legally void.”

But Lever remained concerned about her authority to proceed.

In a related development, INS District Director Richard Rogers said Monday that the INS, which under a 1996 federal law must consider deporting noncitizens who knowingly vote illegally, would check voter records only when provided with “a credible lead” about a particular situation or person.

Peter M. Warren can be reached at (714) 966-5982 or at peter.warren@latimes.com.