Sanchez Allies Attack Claims on Illegal Votes

WASHINGTON —  On the eve of the official dismissal of the investigation into Rep. Loretta Sanchez’s 1996 victory, her fellow Democrats on Wednesday unleashed an attack on the House Oversight Committee’s claim that it found 748 people who voted illegally.

While agreeing with the committee’s recommendation that the full House drop the challenge of the election filed 14 months ago by defeated Rep. Robert K. Dornan, Democrats on the oversight panel blasted their colleagues’ methodology in analyzing illegal votes in a 50-page committee report. The Republican majority would not release its report Wednesday.

“The goal of determining whether noncitizens voted is, of course, laudable and important,” wrote Reps. Sam Gejdenson (D-Conn.), Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) and Carolyn C. Kilpatrick (D-Mich.). “What is not justified, however, is undertaking a faulty process using inadequate data, and then grossly mischaracterizing the result.”

The committee voted 13 to 1 last week to dismiss the case against Sanchez, a Garden Grove Democrat who beat Republican incumbent Dornan by 984 votes. But it said that 624 immigrants who registered to vote before becoming citizens and 124 others had improperly cast ballots.

In their report, Democrats call Republican comments about their findings “at best sloppy and at worse slanderous.”

Among the complaints:

* Republicans failed to keep Democrats informed of their work and kept secret various documents involved in the probe.

* Republicans misinterpreted and misapplied the Federal Contested Elections Act.

* The analysis presumed “guilt,” taking a broad list of 136,000 names that appeared both on the 46th District voter rolls and in databases of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, then winnowing it down.

* INS data should not have been relied on to prove or disprove citizenship, since it lacks information on native-born citizens, and because agency officials say their files are not comprehensive.

* Voters were deemed improper even when the names on the voter rolls did not exactly match those in the INS database, or when signature matches were not found.

“This number is flawed,” the report says of the 748 improper votes cited by Republicans, “just as the entire process of analysis was problematic from the beginning.”

The list of suspected illegal voters has not been released because of privacy concerns, so it is impossible to determine whether the Democrats’ critique applies directly to the Republican claims. But the report provides the first specific insight to the content of the investigation.

The Democrats accuse the Republicans of counting some unknown number of people as illegal voters even though their profile on the Orange County voter rolls does not exactly match that of the noncitizen in INS files. A Rose and a Rosendo, for example, were assumed to be the same person, the report alleges.

According to the Democrats, some voters counted as illegal had been registered to vote and naturalized as citizens decades ago.

One example is “Daniel G,” a voter who was born in Mexico in 1912. Three different “Daniel Gs” popped up in INS files, according to the report. Two were naturalized in time to vote legally in the 1996 election; the third has no naturalization date in the file, the report says. The Democrats claim the Republicans count this person as an illegal voter, but note that there is also a Daniel G who became a citizen in 1953, registered to vote in 1978--and, as an aside, voted several times for Dornan. It is impossible to know, they claim, whether the INS’ third Daniel G has never been naturalized as Republicans assume, or whether the INS lost his file.

“The bottom line is that there is no way to tell if the OC person is likely the person in the INS databases,” the report argues.

Although the Democrats say they conducted their own analysis of the data, they do not say in the report how many illegal votes they uncovered. They also never say how many of the Republicans’ purported 748 illegal votes they believe are actually proper.

As the Sanchez case comes to a close today, the House will also discuss legislation intended to prevent similar problems in the future by tightening voter-registration procedures. Sponsored by Rep. Stephen Horn (R-Long Beach), the bill would allow local election officials to require people to provide their Social Security numbers when registering to vote, and allow verification of citizenship with the INS and Social Security Administration.

Dornan, who was barred from the House floor last fall after an altercation with Rep. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), said Wednesday he plans to attend today’s session in hopes of persuading his former colleagues to keep his case alive.

“No man or woman of my party can vote for [the resolution]. . . . This is nuts,” he said. “I will be sitting in the front row directly in front of the lectern, so people who vote for this unethical resolution have to look right down the gun barrel at me.”

*

Times political writer Peter M. Warren in Orange County contributed to this story.