Way Out of Step in Orange County : GOP’s Actions Belie Its Talk of Winning Latino Votes

What’s the problem with Republicans? Whenever they seem on the verge of a breakthrough with Latino voters, they shoot themselves in the foot.

It happened again in last week’s general election, the culmination of a national campaign in which both Democratic and Republican candidates made unprecedented efforts to win Latino voter support. But what Latinos will remember about the election of 1988 were the insulting and heavy-handed tactics used by Republican officials in Orange County (and a few other places) to keep them from voting.

At the behest of a Republican candidate who was locked in a tight race for a seat in the California Assembly, GOP officials in Orange County paid about $5,000 to hire 20 uniformed security guards and post them at polling stations in heavily Latino precincts in Santa Ana. They carried large signs, in Spanish and English, saying: “Non-citizens can’t vote.” Some questioned Latinos who did come to the polls and wrote down the license-plate numbers of their cars. In one instance a guard handled a voter’s ballot a felony under state law.

After a few hours, and many complaints, Santa Ana police ordered the private guards away from the polling stations. Republican officials explained their use, saying they had heard rumors that the Democrats might bus large numbers of illegal aliens to the polls to vote. That explanation is so ludicrous that even Latino Republicans were not convinced. Orange County Supervisor Gaddi Vasquez, the top Latino Republican officeholder in the state, said that the use of the guards was “inappropriate and unacceptable.” John Acosta, a fellow Republican and a Santa Ana city councilman, was less diplomatic. “It’s un-American,” he said. “It borders on Nazism.”

The resulting outcry was so unanimous that Orange County Republican chairman Tom Fuentes publicly apologized, saying, “If there was an offense taken by anyone . . . we need to say lo siento , which is ‘we are sorry’.” Fuentes accepted the responsibility for allowing GOP money to be spent on security at the polls, but said he didn’t know that it would be used to hire uniformed guards. He blamed that decision on Carlos Rodriguez, a professional political consultant who ran the Republican campaign in the district.

Fuentes can apologize in any language he wants, but his explanation doesn’t wash. He has been the chairman of the Orange County GOP since the 1970s. Rodriguez has been in politics a long time, too. Based in Sacramento, he once worked for Democrats in the state Assembly, but now focuses on GOP campaigns. For either of them to feign ignorance or innocence is cynical.

As if their political experience were not enough, both Fuentes and Rodriguez are Latino. Even presuming they did not know that they were doing something that might be illegal, one would hope that they at least had the ethnic sensitivity to realize how it would look to send uniformed guards only to polling places in Latino neighborhoods. It sends a message, however indirectly, that Latinos are somehow less trustworthy than other Americans--that they cannot be relied on to responsibly and honestly exercise the most fundamental right that the citizens of a democratic nation have.

Thankfully this country has laws against such exclusionary election tactics, which is why Fuentes and Rodriguez are under investigation by several law-enforcement agencies, including the FBI. The way the two men are backtracking, investigators may not find much evidence to use against them. The only satisfaction that angry Latinos may get is in knowing that close scrutiny by FBI agents may make Fuentes and Rodriguez feel the same unease, embarrassment and even shame that their hired guards made some Latino voters feel.

Just for the record, it should be noted that in a rather more important electoral contest last Tuesday Vice President George Bush barely got one-third of the Latino vote nationally in his presidential victory over Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts. That support was not pivotal to Bush’s election. It was not as high as the Latino support won in 1984 by President Reagan. It was, in fact, barely respectable for a Republican candidate, which means that the GOP is still not making the inroads among Latino voters that its national leaders say they want.

It is not unreasonable to suggest that one reason for their failure is the attitude of local GOP campaigners like Fuentes and Rodriguez--and, for that matter, the Republicans in Texas who last week used similar tactics to try to keep Latinos in the Rio Grande Valley from voting. The Texas GOP paid for Spanish-language radio ads warning that “the authorities” would be watching polling places to make sure that only legally registered citizens voted. Unlike the Orange County case, there is no evidence that the ads kept Latinos from voting, but they angered many of them.

To answer my original question: The trouble that many Republicans have when it comes to Latino voters is that they’re afraid of them. Both in Orange County and in south Texas, local GOP leaders knew that Chicano activists had intense voter-registration drives under way, aimed at signing up occasional or first-time voters. Rather than use campaign money to persuade those Latinos to vote Republican, GOP decision-makers spent it on implied threats that they hoped would intimidate inexperienced voters, keep them from casting ballots and possibly sway tight contests in the GOP’s favor. It was a mean-spirited and small-minded approach.

So, for all the talk by national candidates like Reagan and Bush that Latinos share their conservative values, Republicans still have a long way to go before Latinos feel truly welcome in the GOP. It won’t happen until more local Republicans change their retrograde, maybe even racist, attitudes about minority-group voters.