A Winner Named Nguyen, But Which One?
February 16, 2007
WESTMINSTER, Calif. — A recount was expected this week to start in the California Orange County Board of Supervisors race where a slim seven-vote margin separates two Vietnamese American candidates.
Election officials have certified Garden Grove school board member Trung Nguyen as the unofficial Feb. 6, election winner over Garden Grove City Councilmember Janet Nguyen and eight other candidates.
The race was to fill a vacancy representing Santa Ana, Garden Grove, Westminster and Midway. The five-member board represents 2.9 million residents according to 2005 Census estimates, including 480,000 Asian Pacific Americans.
Trung Nguyen received 10,920 votes with Janet Nguyen trailing with 10,913 votes for the District 1 seat on the five-member county board of supervisors. With such a narrow margin, Janet Nguyen submitted a request to county registrar officials to recount the ballots.
The outcome of the recount will make either Nguyen the first Vietnamese American and Asian Pacific American-elected official in the county, home to the country’s second largest concentration of Vietnamese Americans after the city of San Jose.
County officials could take days to weeks to publicly review each of the 45,946 paper or electronic balloting, while under the scrutiny of the public and campaign workers and attorneys.
Spokesperson and lawyer Michael Schroeder said that a manual count will probably find more ballots for his candidate, Trung Nguyen. Further, he said that Trung Nguyen’s campaign had the edge over Janet Nguyen among the 34,978 absentees counted over the 10,956 cast at election-day polls. Ballots cast electronically through touch screen are not expected to budge, he said.
“[The absentees are] not likely to be Janet Nguyen’s friend,” said Schroeder, the former chairman of the California Republican Party.
Janet Nguyen, however, said that a 200-vote margin is a “rule of thumb” to call for a recount in the county and state’s unprecedented single-digit margin race. “Voices have been heard and have entered the political arena,” she said. “Every vote does matter.”
Andrew Do, campaign manager for Janet Nguyen, said, “We have a lot of irregularities in voting patterns and reports from community people. … We will look into all of these.”
For example, former Orange County prosecutor Do noted that people may have inadvertently given absentee ballots from voters to take to the registrar. Election law only allows an immediate family member to help a voter cast the absentee ballot.
“There’s no way to trace that person’s vote to the ballot,” he said, but he said it was an opportunity to “get to the bottom of these practices [and] clean this system up.”
Janet Nguyen said that the recount could cost her $600 to $700 per day for the registrar of voters. That does not include tens of thousands of dollars for election law attorneys and observers scrutinizing ballots whose “voter intent” may be unclear and open to interpretation.
The recount could end a frenetic dash triggered by Supervisor Lou Correia’s election to the state senate last November. Correia, whose term expires in 2008, vacated the seat and launched the Feb. 6, special election.
The hotly contested race pit Trung, an engineer/school board member who ran as “the conservative candidate.” He had garnered the support of the Vietnamese American political establishment, including Assemblyman Van Tran (R-Garden Grove) and Councilwoman Madison Nguyen (D-San Jose).
Janet Nguyen ran with the backing of Garden Grove and Westminster’s mayor on a platform of improving health care, education, small business, fighting crime and fiscal responsibility. She campaigned against the democratic, labor or other “political machines” backing Trung Nguyen, Umberg and Bustamante.
Schroeder described the campaign as “bareknuckle,” “rough and tumble” and actually “typical for Little Saigon.” During the campaign, accusations were made about a candidate’s parents being a prostitute or pro-communist during the Vietnam War. A doctored photo of another candidate next to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger became a campaign issue.
Both Nguyens intensely focused on boosting the turnout of Little Saigon’s voters — the Westminster and Garden Grove enclaves of Vietnamese Americans. While slightly one-fifth of the district turned out for the special election, Schroeder estimated that the 60 percent turnout of the 50,000 Vietnamese American voters far exceeded their actual 22 percent strength of the 205,459 voter electorate.
“The election really sends a message that the Vietnamese American community wants to be heard,” said Schroeder.
Both Nguyen campaigns were intensely calling voters multiple times. Trung Nguyen had at least 20 volunteers calling nightly. Janet Nguyen had as many, calling 4,000 voters every three days.
The two Nguyens, both republicans, outdistanced former Assemblyman Tom Umberg, a democrat, who garnered 9,728 votes, or 21.4 percent, and republican Santa Ana Councilman Carlos Bustamante with 7,475 votes, or 16.5 percent. Pundits had predicted that Asian American and republican candidates would splinter their votes, opening the way for Umberg.
Among the six remaining candidates, Vietnamese American Larry Phan, an Orange County employee and television producer finished in eighth place with 419 votes, or 0.9 percent, in the low-turnout, non-partisan race.
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