O.C. Moves Toward Recall Probe

Orange County supervisors laid the groundwork Tuesday for an investigation into the registrar of voters’ handling of petitions to recall the trustees of a South County school district, including his decision to allow school officials to review the names of those who signed the petitions.

The investigation would be the first by an official agency into allegations that the registrar’s office mishandled the effort to recall all seven board members of the Capistrano Unified School District. State law says that only recall proponents may review signatures, and then only if the effort fails.

Meanwhile, the district superintendent for the first time admitted the existence of spreadsheets listing parents, teachers and others who received e-mails from pro-recall activists. Supt. James A. Fleming said that when questioned about an “enemies list,” he didn’t realize reporters were referring to the spreadsheets.

Fleming said the list was part of an effort to determine whether someone had hacked into the district’s computer system.

The recall drive, prompted by assertions of long-standing financial mismanagement and misconduct by the district, failed when the county registrar, Neal Kelley, determined in December that the backers had not gathered enough valid signatures to force an election.

In a presentation to the board Tuesday, Kelley acknowledged he should not have allowed district officials to review the petitions.

“I stand before you today to say that was the wrong decision,” Kelley told the board.

David Smollar, then district spokesman, had written down the names of 24 people who signed the petitions, an act supervisors Chairman Bill Campbell called “abhorrent” and “outlandish.”

Smollar has maintained that Fleming ordered him to write down the names and accepted the list. Fleming denies that, saying that when Smollar handed the list to him, he immediately returned it, believing it was “improper.”

Until the controversy over the Capistrano recall emerged last week, Kelley had been a wellregarded figure as registrar, running three tightly scheduled elections with little complication.

Kelley became acting registrar in August after the previous registrar, Steve Rodermund, was placed on administrative leave because of a personnel matter.

Rodermund presided over a number of high-profile missteps, including scheduling a special election on the Jewish holy day Rosh Hashana; a weeklong delay in the November 2004 election results; and the assignment of wrong ballots to thousands of voters in March 2004. Though an investigation found no merit to Rodermund’s personnel case, which was unrelated to the election problems, Kelley was made registrar in April. Rodermund now works in the county executive’s office.

Campbell asked county staff to report back in two weeks with options on how to proceed with an investigation, which could include hiring an outside law firm or a retired registrar to conduct it. He made the request after noting discrepancies between accounts offered by Kelley and by the backers of the recall. The supervisors must vote before an investigation can proceed.

Many names on the Capistrano recall petitions were voided because the petition circulators filled in voters’ addresses and other information. State law requires that those who sign petitions must fill in that information themselves. Recall backers say the registrar’s office gave them the OK to fill in the voters’ information, but Kelley said his staff denied giving such advice.

Recall proponents also said they found more than 600 names invalidated by the registrar’s office that should have been accepted. Kelley said they were wrong and that a state judge, who dismissed a lawsuit over the recall last week, upheld virtually all of his decisions.

Most troubling to the supervisors was the fact that Kelley allowed district officials to review the petitions. Kelley said he didn’t know it was illegal and that it was an honest mistake.

Smollar said an employee at the registrar’s office, as she was escorting district officials to view the petitions, told them it was improper but that Kelley was making an exception in this case. “For them to say they didn’t know it wasn’t legal, that’s just not true,” Smollar said.

Recall proponents and others have also been angered by revelations that the district maintained lists of parents, teachers and others who received e-mails from pro-recall forces.

On Tuesday, Fleming sent a memo to the district’s seven trustees describing how the lists were created.

” ... The mystery about the so-called ‘recall database’ has been solved,” Fleming wrote. “Notably, this entire issue had nothing to do with the creation of any ‘list.’ It had to do with our concerns, beginning 15 months ago, about the possibility of people hacking into our student and employee databases and accessing confidential information, and the steps we took to try to get to the bottom of the matter.”

Fleming said that starting more than a year ago, recall organizers would send “e-mail blasts” to scores of people, and some recipients called the district, worried that their e-mail addresses were being released without their consent.

Fleming said the district grew concerned that someone was hacking into its databases to get the e-mail addresses. Computer specialists searched district systems to see whether the names were connected, perhaps by school or city. That resulted in the creation of spreadsheets that contained names, e-mail addresses, schools and other information, he said.

The specialists found no pattern and said it was unlikely that the computer system had been hacked, Fleming said. “Some of the individuals in [the] e-mail blasts were not in our database at all. Some were teachers in our district. Some were parents of district students. Notably, some were well-known recall leaders, while -- incredibly -- others were well-known recall opponents.”

He said the lists were discarded.

Recall proponents dismissed Fleming’s memo.

“James Fleming is once again trying to spin his way out of a mess he created himself. I don’t buy one word of it,” said Tom Russell, spokesman for the CUSD Recall Committee. “This has gone too far.... Now is the time for the Orange County Board of Education and the district attorney to step in to protect the residents of south Orange County from this obvious government abuse.”

Attempts to reach the district attorney’s office late Tuesday were unsuccessful. Bill Habermehl, superintendent of the county Department of Education, said he lacked jurisdiction.