Sanchez Calls Action Premature, Illegal; House Panel Meets Today : Dornan Serves Subpoenas to Bolster Claims

Ousted U.S. Rep. Robert K. Dornan on Tuesday served more than two dozen subpoenas seeking records to bolster his contention that his defeat in November came in a contest tainted by voter fraud and election irregularities.

The subpoenas were served on the eve of the first public meeting of the congressional panel that will hear the election challenge by the former Orange County representative.

A spokesman for Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove), who defeated Dornan by 984 votes called all of the subpoenas premature and illegal.

“We will follow on every subpoena he issues and tell the recipient that they are not compelled to follow them,” said Steve Jost, chief of staff for Sanchez, who called Dornan “the self-appointed sheriff of Orange County.”

Jost said Dornan’s process servers were misrepresenting themselves as being from the House Oversight Committee, while Dornan’s representatives said Sanchez’s challenge to the subpoenas shows she is interested in concealing the truth.

The subpoenas were authorized Feb. 14 in a court order issued in Santa Ana by U.S. Magistrate Judge Elgin Edwards.

Sanchez’s congressional office in Garden Grove and Stephen Brixey III, Sanchez’s husband, were served Tuesday and asked to produce campaign finance records. Also served was the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project in Montebello, a nonprofit group that runs voter registration drives, according to Jost.

Dornan attorney Mike Schroeder said documents were also sought from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

“We are trying to find documentary evidence establishing that noncitizens and illegal aliens voted in the Dornan-Sanchez election,” said Mike Schroeder, a lawyer for Dornan.

Lawyers for Sanchez argued that Dornan will not be authorized to issue subpoenas unless the committee decides that there are “credible allegations and evidence to support the claims” made by Dornan in a brief filed this month with Congress. They said they would seek to have them quashed.

“The magistrate [who approved the subpoenas] was completely uninformed about the thing,” said Sanchez lawyer Fred Woocher, adding that never in the last 30 years has a contestant been issued independent subpoena power.

Dornan lawyer Bill Hart said Sanchez was trying “to short-circuit the process” by forcing the committee to decide after seeing only the evidence Dornan is able to gather without the power to compel testimony or production of records.

“They are trying to hide,” Hart said. “Loretta Sanchez should be out front saying we want to see all these records--including INS’s-- because that would clear this up.”

Today’s session in Washington is similar to a pretrial conference in a judge’s chambers to discuss the status of a case. The three-member Contested Elections Task Force is expected to get a briefing from staff counsel on how to proceed.

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So low are the expectations for the session that neither Dornan nor Sanchez are expected to attend.

That does not mean, however, that the congressional panel--two Republicans and one Democrat--does not have key issues to decide.

Pending before the committee is a motion by Sanchez to throw out Dornan’s request for a new election.

Sanchez contends Dornan should have taken his case to California state court before appealing to the House, and that Dornan has not offered proof that the alleged voter irregularities would have changed the outcome of the election.

She says the panel should require Dornan provide details, including the names of illegal voters, to substantiate his claim.

Both sides have suggested the committee hold a hearing in Orange County.

While congressional staffers were downplaying the significance of today’s congressional meeting, the panel will be watched very closely. The focus of the investigation is Dornan’s contention that hundreds of Latino immigrants registered to vote before they had completed the process to become citizens. He has also alleged that the Orange County registrar cannot accurately show who voted and that it counted scores of ineligible absentee ballots.

Congressional observers have said that unless Dornan can meet the high standard set by the House in recent election contests--in this case, produce the names of about 2,000 illegal voters and prove they changed the outcome of the election--the Republicans risk being branded anti-ethnic.

“This is a pretty unusual election contest historically,” Hart said. “Without question, hundreds of voters voted illegally. The question that remains is the difficult one, and that is, to what extent did it occur?”

Rather than turn the process into a crusade for Dornan, Republicans have said the debate should focus on allegations of voter fraud.

So far, the Orange County district attorney’s office has said it found 227 illegal voter registrations countywide in last November’s election, but has not stated how many were in the central Orange County congressional district.

Jost conceded that weighing the election challenge could take as long as eight months.

“Mr. Dornan has offered no credible evidence that this election outcome could be changed by anything that’s been reported,” Jost said.