Registrar: 98 Votes Should Not Have Counted

SANTA ANA — Registrar Rosalyn Lever has told Congress that 98 absentee ballots tallied in the 46th Congressional District in November should not have been counted because voters did not return them in person or through an authorized third party.

In some cases, signatures on the ballot were omitted or did not match.

Lever made the statement in written testimony submitted this week to the chairman of the task force considering the challenge to the election of Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) by former Congressman Robert K. Dornan.

In the letter released Wednesday by her office, Lever disclosed that more ineligible absentee ballots were counted than previously acknowledged. Prior to this, Lever has written that four absentee ballots were “not properly executed,” but she has not said that any absentee ballots should have been disqualified.

The analysis was done by the registrar’s office last week in response to Dornan’s testimony and written presentation at the task force hearing April 19.

Dornan had submitted to the panel a list of 197 absentee ballots, which he contended should not have been counted because they did not conform to the law. All were turned in at the polls by third parties on election day. Previously, he had contended there were 128 bad absentee ballots counted.

Dornan lost the election to Sanchez by 984 votes and has asked Congress to order a new election. The absentee ballot discrepancy still leaves Dornan far short of the number needed to overturn Sanchez’s victory, even if added to the 303 votes the secretary of state’s office says were cast by people who registered or voted when they were not citizens.

“The number of impermissible votes just keeps getting bigger and bigger,” Dornan attorney Bill Hart said. “We are continuing to review the third-party delivery of absentee ballots and believe the number of tainted ballots will continue to increase.”

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Wylie A. Aitken, chairman of the Sanchez campaign, said the 98 votes are “a far cry from Dornan’s challenge about thousands of voting irregularities and [don’t amount to] credible evidence that the election should be changed.”

Aitken also said it is impossible to say for whom the tainted ballots were cast. “You can’t say they even voted in the congressional race; perhaps they voted for president and went home,” he said. “It just doesn’t lead us anywhere.”

Lever said that “the bottom line is we should not have processed” the 98, and “had we gone strictly by [the law] those should have been caught and not counted.”

“The code says anybody can put the ballot in the mail for the voter but only the voter or someone designated by statute can personally turn it in,” Lever said.

The dispute over third-party returns of absentee ballots concerns the state law that requires such ballots be mailed or turned in by the voter.

State law, however, also allows they be turned in at the polls by immediate relatives of the voter, including the voter’s parents, child, siblings and grandparent or grandchild. The relative and the voter must sign the outside of the envelope and the relative must indicate their relationship to the voter.

In her letter to Vern Ehlers, the Michigan Republican who heads the contested election panel, Lever gave this breakdown of the 197 absentee ballots Dornan contends should not have been tallied:

* 90 “do not appear to have strictly conformed to the criteria” of the elections code, though they were signed by the voter. “By state law, these ballots should have been challenged and not counted,” Lever wrote. This group includes in-laws, cousins, friends, roommates, and nursing home staff.

* 8 whose voter signature was omitted or did not match, and “should not have been counted.”

* 95 “appear to have met the basic criteria of absentee return,” she wrote. This group includes 18 returned by someone who did not indicate a relationship to the voter, 18 returned by a “designated representative” in an emergency situation, and 11 returned by an authorized relative who failed to sign the envelope.

* 4 are duplicates.

In her letter, Lever said that some would argue that all the votes in the 90-ballot group should be counted because the Elections Code provides that decisions “shall be liberally construed in favor of the absent voter.”

“We are not making that argument,” she said.