Swearing In Won’t End Sanchez Saga

WASHINGTON — When Loretta Sanchez stands on the floor of the House of Representatives today to be sworn in as a member of the 105th Congress, she will be among Democrat and Republican colleagues who could be called upon to decide whether she gets to finish her first term without having to go through another election.

The House Oversight Committee, which supervises election contests, will decide in a few weeks whether to consider defeated Rep. Robert K. Dornan’s request that Sanchez’s election be set aside for another vote in California’s 46th Congressional District in central Orange County.

In an appeal filed with the House last month, Dornan contended “illegal votes were cast,” and that “irregularities were sufficient to change the election result.”

If Sanchez is worried, it is not readily apparent. During a television interview last week, she brushed aside concerns that the election will be overturned.

“I’m not going to worry about it. I have a job to do,” Sanchez said. “I have lawyers working on it. Bob Dornan can jump and scream and do whatever he wants. We’ve won.”

Still, Sanchez has yet to exhale--to fully enjoy the relief of a hard-fought election victory without worrying about Dornan’s next move.

Just a few weeks ago, during her orientation session in Washington, Sanchez was called the “dragon slayer” for apparently striking a fatal blow to the political career of Dornan, the firebrand conservative that liberals love to hate. But as she boarded her flight to Washington late Friday, it was unclear whether the blow--a 984-vote victory--was fatal.

The history of election contests before the House suggests Dornan has a tough case to prove, according to Democrats and Republicans who have fought these battles before.

Both sides agree on this much: Dornan must identify those who voted illegally; that Sanchez received those illegal votes; and that Dornan would have won had those votes not been cast. Because the ballots are secret, it is difficult to prove which candidate received the illegal votes, attorneys in Washington say.

Once it became clear Dornan intended to challenge Sanchez’s victory, Oversight Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Bakersfield) observed: “You not only have to have the evidence that it occurred, but it has to have occurred in sufficient numbers to affect the outcome.”

Democratic attorney Timothy Downs, who has a long history of work on federal election contests and might become involved in this case, said he recently read Dornan’s four-page appeal to the House and concluded it “is one of the feebler set of pleadings” he has seen because it lacks specific cases of voter fraud.

Thomas and Downs were on opposite sides of the legendary “Bloody 8th,” the 1984 election in Indiana’s 8th Congressional District and the first time that the House refused to seat a candidate.

In that contest, Republican Richard D. McIntyre’s narrow election victory had been certified by the state, only to have the House step in and order a recount of its own. In the end, the Democrat-controlled House voted to give the seat to Frank McCloskey. Republicans walked out in protest.

“I vowed if we would ever end up in a position of power . . . that only under extreme circumstances, with more than sufficient evidence, would we ever overturn the results as presented to us by the jurisdiction, which is the state certification,” Thomas said after the November election.

What Dornan might have going for him is that the secretary of state recently undertook an investigation of Dornan’s allegations.

Also, since Dornan filed his complaint with the House, new evidence has surfaced that ballots were cast in the district by noncitizens who were registered to vote with help from the Santa Ana-based Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, an immigrant-rights organization. The Orange County district attorney’s office also is looking into the matter.

“There can no longer be any serious question that this election was tampered with,” said Dornan’s attorney, Michael Schroeder. “Really, the only question now is whether or not it can be proven that the tampering rose to such a level that it fixed the election. We believe that was the case.”

Sanchez, who has limited her public comments on the ongoing investigations, maintained during the recent television interview that her election would not be marred. “We had nothing to do with any of that,” she said of the alleged voter fraud. She has not returned repeated telephone calls from The Times.

Her attorneys must formally seek a dismissal of Dornan’s allegations before the House by the end of the month. With the full committee still to be appointed, staffers said it could be weeks before the committee even decides whether to appoint a special task force to conduct hearings. If hearings are held, it could be months before the matter is settled. In the meantime, Sanchez will represent the district.

In the private quarters of the Sanchez camp, there were concerns recently that maverick GOP members might object to her being seated--or at least insist that she be sworn in separately--because of the charges raised by Dornan. But election experts on Capitol Hill said that is unlikely because of the bad memories from the bitter “Bloody 8th” fight.

Said Herb Stone, a lawyer for Democrats on the House Oversight Committee: “Everybody on both sides of the aisle agrees that [the Indiana election battle] was a most unfortunate outcome and is not something that anybody wants to see repeated.”

Also contributing to this report was Times political writer Peter M. Warren