Cleanup of Voter Rolls Near Finish

Four years after allegations that some Orange County immigrants were improperly registered to vote, election officials are finally wrapping up a protracted effort to remove noncitizens from the rolls.

The charges came in 1996, when former Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) accused Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, a Latino civil rights group, of illegally registering noncitizens to vote.

A grand jury declined to file charges against anyone, and the House Oversight Committee in 1998 concluded a probe without proof that enough noncitizens had voted in the 46th Congressional District to make a difference in the race won by Democrat Loretta Sanchez.

Since then, the California secretary of state and the county registrar have identified many noncitizens on the voter rolls. Hundreds have been removed, and others who became citizens after the 1996 election have been asked to re-register; only a handful of cases are still in limbo.

State and county officials expect the saga to end within 60 days, when a review of the rolls is completed after the March election. “It has taken a really long time,” acknowledges Assistant Registrar Don Taylor. “Hopefully this will bring closure to this matter.”

The end will not mean criminal charges for anyone, officials stress.

“Our interest is not to criminally prosecute those who made an honest mistake or were misguided,” said Beth Miller, a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Bill Jones. “We just need Orange County’s list to be accurate.”

The first attempt to purge the rolls of noncitizens was made by Jones’ office and the INS shortly after the 1996 election. That effort ended in 1997, when officials removed 561 names from the rolls in the 46th Congressional District.

The process began again in 1998 after the House Oversight Committee completed its investigation into Dornan’s allegations that he lost the 1996 election to Sanchez because of noncitizen voting. The committee concluded its work by stating it could prove only that 748 had voted illegally in the Dornan-Sanchez race--200 shy of Sanchez’s margin of victory.

The House also drew up a list of 1,499 suspected noncitizens in the 46th District by matching voters with INS records of the names and birth dates of people who became citizens after they had registered or were not citizens in early 1998. The committee turned that list over to Jones’ office.

Since then, the state, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the county registrar of voters have been sorting through the names to determine which were registered improperly.

But work was stalled for months, officials say, by a lack of cooperation between huge government bureaucracies.

“It has been very difficult to get the INS to engage again in reviewing this type of list,” Miller said. “It was a very frustrating time. But since early fall, we communicated that we had to get this done before the election and we’ve been working hard on it.”

INS officials said the delay was partly due to the backlog of naturalization applications pending in the Los Angeles District, which affected the 1996 Orange County cases and many others.

By early fall of 1999, however, the INS had narrowed the list of questionable names to 480. Some noncitizens were identified for removal from the rolls; others weeded out were voters born in the United States and people who were no longer registered.

Using this reduced list, the county registrar in January sent out letters in English and Spanish giving people still under scrutiny three options: declare they were citizens when they registered; re-register if they gained citizenship after first signing up to vote; or identify themselves as noncitizens so they could be removed.

So far, 330 have been removed from the rolls because they are noncitizens; another nine noncitizens will be removed soon, Miller said. Of the remainder, 109 declared they were citizens when they registered. Finally, 32 who have not been located will be questioned if and when they try to vote.

Some say the results show there are no widespread problems with voter registration.

“That small number in a county the size of Orange is not particularly unusual or should be a cause for concern,” said Thomas Saenz, legal counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “I don’t think we’ll ever have perfection in the rolls.”

But others say the lesson is simply that that local, state and federal governments must do more to keep noncitizens off the voter rolls.

“In the resolution passed by the House at the end of the investigation, they clearly stated that there was a lot of stonewalling by the government,” said Alberto Sandoval, an activist in the county’s GOP. “I would tend to agree with that. Government agencies need to pick up their responsibility and do this work. They’re charged with making sure the voter rolls are clean. And, unfortunately, we’ve found they aren’t.”