Much at Stake for GOP in Dornan Case

By GEBE MARTINEZ

Feb. 21, 1997 12 AM PT

WASHINGTON — There won’t be witnesses wearing hoods to conceal their identities. Nor will there be any melodramatic disclosures such as secret tape recordings of Oval Office conversations or of foreign money reaching national elections. There won’t even be any testimony on the first day by the two main parties in the case of Robert K. Dornan vs. Loretta Sanchez.

But when the sharp clap of a gavel next week opens the first public congressional meeting on Dornan’s charge that voter fraud caused him to lose his Orange County congressional seat to Sanchez, a Democrat, there will be more at stake than just the political careers of these two individuals.

On trial will be the ability of both Republicans and Democrats to stick to the election contest rules. And in this particular game of politics, the Republicans are the ones who seem to have the most to lose.

“I think they face a conflict,” said John Pitney, a Claremont McKenna College professor who studies the politics of House Republicans.

“On the one hand, they have legitimate suspicions of voter fraud and they certainly don’t want to lose one of their own to a fraudulent election. But on the other hand, they are going to proceed with great caution because the symbolism of throwing out a Latina woman could be very damaging,” Pitney said.

The House has not faced such a potentially fractious election fight since a 1984 battle over Indiana’s 8th Congressional District. In that contest, Republican Richard D. McIntyre appeared to have a narrow victory, only to have the Democrat-controlled House step in and turn the seat over to its own party member, Frank McCloskey.

In the case to be opened next week by the House Contested Election Task Force, Dornan, the conservative Republican firebrand, lost to Sanchez, a political neophyte who grew up in Anaheim, by 984 votes in a district heavily populated by Latino and Asian immigrants.

Dornan immediately charged that Sanchez won because large numbers of Latino noncitizens had voted illegally.

Although the Sanchez campaign has not been directly tied to any alleged voter fraud, an investigation by the Orange County district attorney’s office has revealed that at least 227 noncitizens registered to vote countywide in last November’s election.

But the district attorney’s investigation so far has not revealed how many of those potential voters might have actually cast ballots in the Dornan-Sanchez district. And in any case, the number at this point still falls far short of the 2,000 to 3,000 illegal votes that the GOP would probably need to find to avoid being branded as an “anti-ethnic” party, said Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego.

“You would have to show there were at least 1,000 voters who were voting illegally and you also have to make the projection that they were voting for her and not for Dornan,” Jacobson said. “It has to be on a scale that would plausibly affect the outcome of the election.”

The risk to the GOP is not small, added Pitney, when one considers that Latinos are expected to account for 44% of the national population growth during the next 25 years. “They may end up gaining a single seat, but at the cost of losing the Latino community in the long run,” he said.

Smartly, the political observers said, the Republicans so far are avoiding making a major fight to preserve Dornan’s congressional career, which ran for 18 years.

“My guess is that not many of [House Republicans] are greatly in love with Bob Dornan, who is a maverick,” Jacobson said. Added Pitney: “If anything, Bob Dornan’s personality works against him because Republicans privately regard him as a liability.”

There is, of course, a strong possibility that the Dornan case will reveal broader voter fraud. And that is where Republicans are focusing the attention.

“Properly viewed, this is not a political question but a legal question; a law enforcement question. This has a lot less to do with a campaign contest than it does with enforcing criminal statutes for violation of the voting laws,” said Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach).

Cox is vice chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, which is investigating the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s “Citizenship USA” campaign to speed the processing time of citizenship applications. Republicans have charged that the intent was to increase the number of Democratic voters before the election last November.

Cox and the four other Orange County Republicans in Congress have called for holding hearings in the county to examine the INS’ naturalization process and how it might have affected voter fraud. (Sanchez, the county’s lone Democrat in Congress, also has asked the election task force to meet in Orange County.)

“Every Democrat and every Republican has a strong interest in making sure that his or her vote counts. It will be eluded, however, if illegal voting is permitted,” Cox said.

But Steven Jost, Sanchez’s chief of staff, does not believe that simply protecting the rights of voters is the ultimate motive of the Republicans. “I think their principal objective is to make political hay for Republicans in general,” he said.

If Jost is right, the congressional affairs specialists said, the Republicans may be headed for trouble.