Undocumented voters

A MID January ad in the Washington Blade, a paper for the capital's homosexual community, announced the "Red Ribbon Inaugural Gala," organized by AIDS lobbyist Tom Sheridan. The aim: to aid Loretta Sanchez, the new Democratic congresswoman from Orange County, whose social-issue liberalism gets gay activists cheering almost as robustly as they boo the man she upset on November 5.

The ad described the Red Ribbon affair as a "benefit for Loretta's legal defense against Bob Dornan's continued challenge to overturn his defeat. Let's send him home once and for all."

Five weeks later, that goal of Dornan's foes looks increasingly elusive. Attorneys and investigators working with the ousted nine-term congressman continue to pile up evidence of fraud in an election decided by fewer than one thousand votes. Try as some of them might, journalists in a competitive, two-newspaper county haven't been able to ignore the smell of something rotten in the ballot results. And the Orange County district attorney is on the case.

In short, Miss Sanchez might have need of a few more fundraisers before it's all over -- and even then, there's a real chance that she, not Dornan, could be the one sent "home once and for all."

Dornan's people have compiled a knapsack full of what you might call standard-issue irregularities, the kind that made Cook County famous, and that California's lax election rules, which don't require identification from would-be voters, seem to invite in abundance. Dornan points, for instance, to at least 38 double voters, 128 absentee ballots turned in illegally, and more than 900 ballots for which there are no corresponding names on the county registrar's computer tape which is supposed to indicate who voted. Does that numbers gap reflect clerical error -- or ballot-box stuffing? Or a bit of both?

Most investigation so far has focused on noncitizens allegedly recruited to the polls by the Latino advocacy group Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, which is a sub-contractor providing citizenship classes for the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The law says you must be a citizen to register to vote, a fact declared prominently, and repeatedly, on registration forms in California. Yet the Los Angeles Times reported on February 8 that 600 resident aliens were signed up to vote through the efforts of Hermandad, and that 407 of those people went on to cast ballots on November 5.

In addition, the paper found 105 apparently illegal aliens who also voted after registering through Hermandad.

In an affidavit produced to get a warrant to search Hermandad's Santa Ana offices, the D.A. quotes five unnamed informants, all noncitizens who were registered to vote by Hermandad. Two of them say that every person who completed an INS interview at Hermandad's headquarters was then registered to vote by Hermandad employees, before any of these registrants had become a citizen.

If that is true, it could mean hundreds or thousands more illegal votes, because as many as 12,000 people went through Hermandad classes in the months prior to the election.

The investigators working on behalf of Dornan's election challenge are frustrated that the INS won't release the citizenship status of voters, or, apparently, won't do any investigating on its own. "If the INS would be open and forthright enough to give us this data, we could get this investigation over with in a couple of days," attorney Michael Schroeder, who heads Dornan's effort, told me in early February.

On Valentine's Day, Schroeder's wish was partially fulfilled -- but not courtesy of INS officialdom. Rather, he was visited on the quiet by an INS agent who angrily complained that the agency acquiesced in illegal voting. The whistleblower brought thousands of names of people who had been enrolled in citizenship classes in Dornan's district -- many of whom hadn't become citizens by November 5. Hermandad was not the only group giving citizenship classes under INS contract. And, the whistleblower claims, Hermandad wasn't the only organization that registered noncitizens.

The Dornan team is now cross-checking the names delivered by this INS Deep Throat against the voter-registration rolls. The number of verifiably illegal votes cast in the 46th district seems certain to climb.

One of the most astute -- and cautious -- members of the Dornan investigative squad has said to me, without qualification, "We've won." He cites four developments that he believes will eventually guarantee that a new election will be called.

First, he sees indications that the district attorney's office isn't conducting a narrow inquiry, but is casting its net beyond Hermandad to other immigrant-activist groups that might have registered people illegally.

Second, the House Oversight Committee seems poised to act aggressively on Dornan's election challenge. Chairman Bill Thomas personally signed a subpoena ordering the D.A.'s office to share with the panel all data it got from its January 14 search of Hermandad's headquarters.