A Democratic committee said it has gathered evidence showing that as many as 600 newly registered Republicans – part of an increase touted by the party in recent months – may be fraudulent.
Republican Party officials acknowledge there are some registration problems but say the scope is much smaller than Democrats claim.
So far, the Democratic Voter Education and Registration Fund has given the Orange County Registrar of Voters Office 37 signed complaints in which Orange County voters said they were switched to Republican registration without their consent.
According to the committee, 40 other voters requested that complaint forms be sent to them with forms to re-register as Democrats. An additional 200 did not want to fill out complaint forms, but asked the committee to help them switch back to the Democratic Party. The committee also found more than 300 forms listing invalid addresses and phone numbers.
“People came to us complaining about this,” said Paul Hefner, the Democratic committee spokesman. “They were getting cards in the mail that said, ‘Welcome to the Republican Party.’ They said they had been tricked and they were angry.”
The committee provided The Orange County Register with copies of the complaint forms and other documentation of their investigation. They are trying to determine which agency would be most appropriate to conduct a criminal investigation.
The registrar’s office has found an additional 65 cases – separate from the Democrats’ list – of people being registered to the Republican Party without their knowledge.
Scott Baugh, chairman of the Republican Central Committee of Orange County, said he believed the problems were confined to a few individuals who were fired over the past two months for “inaccuracies” in registration cards or because they were the subject of voter complaints.
“We’ve received six complaints out of the 15,000 letters we sent out to welcome people to the party when they register,” Baugh said. He did not identify the workers who were fired, one on Jan. 18 and two more on Feb. 2.
Baugh also said the committee and the party each conduct audits of the process because they pay a $10 “bounty” per registration card to their workers.
One of the criticisms of the Republican Party’s method is that the bounty, although legal, creates an incentive for fraud. The California Democratic Party, after it was the subject of a criminal investigation in 1988, began paying workers by the hour instead of using the bounty system.
Changing a voter’s party by filing a false registration card is a felony. So is giving the county registration cards of people who do not exist. Both crimes carry prison terms of up to three years and possible fines.
Shannon Gomez, who got her new Republican registration card in the mail in January, said she was tricked in front of a Food 4 Less store in Anaheim. A man in his mid-40s gave her a petition to sign, and tucked underneath was a card. He asked her to sign a box on the card, saying it was only to be used by the registrar’s office to verify her signature on the petition. He first attempted to get her to switch her registration voluntarily, saying he needed the $10 he was paid to feed his family.
“It upset me that he tried to use his family to get me to do something that I didn’t want. I have the right to vote as I wish,” Gomez said.
Voters who were switched unknowingly or who fail to switch back in time could be disqualified from voting in their party’s primary in June.
One race that could be affected by the changes in registration is the hotly contested 34th Senate District. In 2002, Democrats had a 10.6 percentage-point edge over the Republicans. Now the difference is a few hundred voters.
The Democrats’ investigation began in mid-January. They took a two-pronged approach that included having willing voters sign the complaint forms and buying the registrar’s electronic list of the last 4,000 newly registered Republicans in Orange County.
The committee says it has attempted to contact nearly half the people on the list, and considers the result to be a significant sampling.
Nearly 3,000 of those 4,000 new Republican registrations – gathered since Nov. 8 – were tracked back by the Democratic committee to a Riverside man, Chris Dinoff.
Dinoff, according to county records obtained by the Register, checked out 16,000 registration cards from September 2005 to February 2006. Each has a serial number attached to it, assigned to Dinoff and the person who is registered.
“I’m being investigated right now,” Dinoff said Monday night in a telephone interview from his home, declining further comment.
Dinoff would not say who was investigating him. Democratic committee officials said they have not contacted him.
Contact the writer: kkindy@ocregister.com
