Mexican standoff

National Review, Feb 10, 1997 by Harold Johnson

BOB DORNAN, ousted from his Orange County congressional seat by a 979-vote margin, didn't lose in vain. In fact, a growing body of evidence suggests that perhaps he didn't lose at all -- that ballot shenanigans might have tipped the scales in favor of his opponent, 36-year-old Democrat Loretta Sanchez.

There were grounds for questioning the result well before November 5. For months, immigrant-rights activists with links to the Democratic Party had been intensively working Hispanic neighborhoods in Dornan's largely blue-collar district, their aggressive methods practically guaranteed to add suspect names to the voter rolls.

Precinct walkers, recruited through ads in a Latino newspaper, were paid to sign up new registrants. One group offered free raffle tickets (prize: a Chevrolet Camaro) to all who could show proof of registering or voting.

A push was made to get new registrants to vote absentee. And there was an organized effort to "help" absentee voters complete their ballots.

Not everyone in the community appreciated the attention. "I feel something funny is happening here [in the 46th Congressional District] with the absentee ballots," Lupe Moreno of Santa Ana wrote to California Secretary of State Bill Jones the day after the election. Three groups of activists had dropped by election night to ask if her son had voted and if they could aid him with his ballot. "I was starting to feel harassed," Mrs. Moreno wrote.

Dornan didn't wait until the votes were counted to warn about irregularities. The night before the election, he was on a Los Angeles TV newscast, citing evidence that as many as six thousand people in Orange County might be registered more than once.

Things got curiouser. The close of election day found him ahead --by 233 votes. However, for the first time in his two-decade political career, the absentee ballots would go against him. Once they had been counted a few weeks later, Miss Sanchez had taken a slim lead, with 47,964 votes to Dornan's 46,980.

The recount that Dornan demanded changed only a few votes. But he still didn't walk away; there was too much that smelled.

-- For instance, there was the unsealed ballot box that was walked into the registrar's office from a Santa Ana polling place. It contained 347 ballots, which the registrar's assistants accepted and immediately began to count.

-- As many as 1,985 phantom votes have turned up throughout the district. These are ballots that seemingly materialized out of the ether; they don't correspond to signatures from the sign-in sheets at polling places. The registrar dismisses the discrepancy -- which showed up on a computer tape of votes cast -- as clerical error. Dornan's people vow to do their own methodical comparison of sign-ins with ballots cast.

-- More than 160 voters are identified on the computer tape as having voted early and often. The registrar acknowledges that she has sent the district attorney a report on people (she won't say how many) who apparently cast two or more ballots.

-- At least 126 absentee ballots were dropped off at polling places by someone other than the voter or an immediate family member, as the law requires.

-- And then there is the issue that has grabbed headlines nationwide -- the role played by non-citizens.

When Dornan initially protested that he might be the first member of Congress voted out by non-citizens, his complaint was contemptuously dismissed in some quarters as sour grapes laced with ethnic animosity. But the sneering stopped after local reporters found fire where Dornan had seen smoke.

The Los Angeles Times interviewed around three dozen people who had taken citizenship classes with Hermandad Mexicana Nacional (the Mexican National Brotherhood), a group that gets federal money to aid immigrants and whose local leader, Nativo Lopez, is a political activist with Democratic ties. Nineteen of these people admitted to voting before they became citizens.

If that percentage holds for all voters registered by Hermandad, it could add up to at least 275 ineligible votes. And Hermandad wasn't the only group that may have signed up non-citizens. The Southwest Voter Registration Education Project was active in Dornan's district, and its voter-registration fliers conspicuously fail to say that one must be a citizen to vote.

Meanwhile, some sixty people who registered through Hermandad told the Orange County Register they had done so before being sworn in as citizens. Four admitted to voting.

On January 14, several weeks after these stories ran, investigators from the Orange County DA's office searched Hermandad's offices as part of a criminal investigation into vote fraud. Computers were carted away, along with piles of documents.

Hermandad officials responded by requesting that the Clinton Justice Department dispatch people to Orange County to "join" the investigation, "and look to see that our rights as citizens, our rights as human beings, are not violated."

"Talk about inviting the fox to a cleanup of the henhouse," one local GOP leader said to me. Suspicions were fueled when James Humble-Sanchez, an agent with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, alleged that INS supervisors had known that private contractors such as Hermandad had been helping non-citizens to register to vote, but that agents who complained to higher-ups were told to forget about it.