U.S. Won’t Prosecute in GOP Poll Guard Case : Investigation: Orange County officials are enraged at not being consulted. They say the case is still open.

In an announcement that caught local prosecutors by surprise, federal authorities said Wednesday they have decided not to file charges in the 1988 poll guard case in which Republican Party officials sent uniformed guards to predominantly Latino polling places.

Justice Department spokeswoman Amy Casner in Washington said the federal government’s investigation was officially concluded Tuesday. She would not elaborate about whether prosecutors did not find evidence of a crime or whether federal laws did not apply.

“It’s just not prosecutable,” she said.

But officials in the Orange County district attorney’s office said Wednesday they have been partners in the investigation and they are furious that federal agents apparently closed their case without consulting them. As a result, local officials said the matter remains open and they indicated that state charges could still be filed.

“We haven’t decided anything,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Wallace Wade, who is in charge of the county’s investigation. “We can make an independent decision (but) I want to talk to Washington before I say anything about that.”

News of the Justice Department decision sparked outrage from Latino community leaders who have charged that the guards were hired to intimidate Latino voters.

“Only in Orange County can you get away with things like this,” said Rueben Martinez, head of Americans for Constitutional Justice, a Latino community group formed to protest the incident.

“I’ve been struggling for more than 30 years to register my people to vote and this is an arrow that went right through my heart,” he said. “I feel weak.”

The case stems from Republican Curt Pringle’s 1988 race in the 72nd Assembly District, which includes Garden Grove and Santa Ana. Pringle’s campaign team and county Republican leaders said they hired the guards for the Nov. 8 election that year because of rumors that Democrats were planning to bring busloads of illegal voters to the district.

Latino leaders countered that the guards were hired to intimidate Latino voters who were likely to oppose Pringle.

Uniformed guards were posted at 20 polling places in heavily Latino precincts in Santa Ana, some holding signs in Spanish saying it was illegal for non-citizens to vote. Pringle won the race by only 867 votes, but he lost his reelection bid to Democrat Tom Umberg last November in a race where the poll guard incident was a major issue.

A group of Latino voters who claimed they were intimidated by the guards filed a civil suit that was settled out of court last year, with insurance companies for Pringle and the county Republican Party paying more than $400,000.

Wednesday, Pringle and county party Chairman Thomas Fuentes said they were happy that the case was concluded but upset that the length of the investigation had damaged their campaigns last year.

Pringle, who has returned to his drapery business in Garden Grove, said, “We knew all along there was no wrongdoing, and it was just a matter of time before this was going to come out.”

Fuentes, who acknowledged that he paid for the guards from Republican coffers, said: “I look back on it as an effort that was entirely well-intentioned but mistakenly implemented. The only concern at the time was to preserve the sanctity of the ballot.”

Fuentes said there was evidence of illegal voting in the race, but that it was improper for the guards to have worn official-looking uniforms.

Last fall, federal investigators in the case wrote in response to an inquiry by then-Rep. Jim Bates (D-San Diego) that it was unlikely they would file charges. The reason they gave was that the incident involved a state Assembly race, not a federal contest, so federal laws did not apply.

There are state laws that prohibit voter intimidation, but Wednesday, local investigators were at a loss to say why those laws were passed over or whether they might still be applied.

“This is just the conversation I’d like to be having with Mr. (Craig C.) Donsanto,” director of the U.S. Justice Department’s election crimes division, said prosecutor Wade.

Wade said county and federal investigators had been conducting a joint investigation and, after the material was reviewed in Washington, both sides were to have discussed a final resolution.

“This is very frustrating for us,” Wade said. “Some person I’ve never heard of in the Justice Department is saying the case is closed and the people we’ve been dealing with for two years haven’t said diddly.”