Editorial: Intimidating voters is a menace to democracy

After a series of protests for and against proposed federal
immigration legislation shook Southern California this spring, the
fires have been stoked once again in a most despicable fashion.

Last week, the campaign of Republican congressional candidate
Tan Nguyen of Orange County’s 47th District was implicated in
a scandal involving letters sent out by a staff member to over
14,000 registered voters in the district, a largely Hispanic area
in Orange County. The letter, written in Spanish and sent to
Hispanic voters, made the claim that “immigrants” who
tried to vote on election day could be arrested or deported if they
showed up at the polls.

This is obviously incorrect, as immigrants who go through the
citizenship process can vote like anyone else.

Compounding this, Neal Kelley, the Orange County registrar of
voters, was supposed to attend a press conference with California
Secretary of State Bruce McPherson denouncing the letters and
detailing steps to counteract their effect.

However, Kelley pulled out of this conference when the Orange
County Board of Supervisors decided that, in the words of
Supervisor Bill Campbell, “the registrar of voters (does) not
have an obligation and should not get into correcting political
mail.”

It is true that the registrar should not concern himself with
correcting every piece of political mail sent out. If this were the
case, voters would constantly be hearing corrections about every
negative piece of campaign mail.

Yet this letter goes far beyond typical circumstances. It
eliminates opposition votes against Nguyen, who could overtake
incumbent Loretta Sanchez, a Hispanic with broad support in the
district. To ignore it would be to overlook one of the
registrar’s key responsibilities.

While it is not the registrar’s task to police all mail
come election season, the office is obliged to make sure every
voter has an equal chance to vote. Normally, this has to do with
issues such as coordinating polling and voter registration. But
when letters such as those sent out by Nguyen’s office fall
into the category of voter intimidation, the county registrar
cannot choose to ignore them.

Even before the scandal, Nguyen had little shot of unseating
Sanchez in the 47th District. The only chance Nguyen’s
campaign had, it would appear, was to discourage as many
“immigrants” from voting as possible, thereby
eliminating voters who would surely cast their ballots for
Sanchez.

What is most troubling about this story is the double standard
it suggests. Nguyen, himself a Vietnamese immigrant, seems to be a
classic example of a pot calling the kettle black. In the eyes of
Nguyen, immigration is fine so long as he and his ethnic group are
the ones in question. In the U.S., a country that became what it is
today through the contributions of immigrants over hundreds of
years, this attitude is especially dangerous.

Despite calls from Republicans and even Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger (an immigrant himself who called the letter a
“hate crime”) to pull out of the race, Nguyen has
declined to do so on the grounds that he had no knowledge of the
letter and seems to consider firing the responsible staff resolving
the issue.

Yet if one person read the letter, believed its claims, and has
decided not to vote, that is already one person too many.