DORNAN, FORMER CONGRESSMAN, REFUSES GRACEFUL EXIT

Infamous Homophobe Claims Voter Fraud Against Election Winner

by Corrine Hicks

Although the November elections were decided four months ago, a lone loser, the fractious former Orange County, California congressman, Bob Dornan, continues to publicly promote a refusal to concede his loss to Democratic Congresswoman, Loretta Sanchez. Though he is well- known for frequent homophobic outbursts on the floor of Congress, Mr. Dornan has presently focused his ire on an Orange County Hispanic rights group, Hermandad Nacional who, he says, purposely registered unnumbered illegals at the November ballot box.

A lawyer for Hermandad says that Bob Dornan is simply trying "to blow this into something that is just not there." Such blowing on Dornan's part is well-known to gay community leaders upon whom Dornan regularly blamed a plethora of world ills while he remained in office. Once, while raving about the gay "menace", his wife, responding to audience hecklers shouted, "Shut Up Fag!" and this response became the title of a book filled with infamous Dornan quotations, a selection of odd outbursts that ought to have have placed him, according to political pundit Michael Moore, in the loony-bin.

The precise number of votes by which Dornan lost his Orange County seat was 984. According to a survey conducted by The Los Angeles Times, the Hispanic organization did, in fact, register 172 non-citizens who later voted in the Dornan-Sanchez contest. But 172 votes, as opponents remind the outraged loser, does not add up to 984, and in spite of Dornan's claim that fraud was pervasive, he must still contend with county officials' reckoning of remaining totaled votes.

In December, after failing at the local level to win a sufficiency of converts to his ruptured cause, Mr. Dornan filed an official complaint with the House Oversight Committee in Congress, demanding that the Orange County election results be overturned. In the meantime, he has also filed a legal brief alleging that 1,789 votes cast in the election were either suspect or demonstrably illegal. On Valentines Day he then issued subpoenas for his case before the House committee. The committee is set to conduct a hearing which, like a trial, will present evidence from both sides. Representative Sanchez, who has filed a motion to dismiss Dornan's charges, says she will ask the House committee to hold hearings in Orange County.

Ms. Sanchez's chief of staff, Steve Jost, says meetings with Orange County officials, particularly those from the county's Registrar of Voters, demonstrate how Mr. Dornan is overblowing everything and everybody. The Registrar has already conducted an investigation which allowed only an additional 5 votes to Mr. Dornan's losing total.

Dornan is well- remembered for having announced that "every lesbian spearchucker in America" hoped he'd lose his seat during the November elections. Now that he has, in fact, lost, Bob Dornan, undaunted, continues to threaten to run once again, two years hence.