Shelby's Life and Whatnot

Tan's In Trouble

You may remember seeing some previous posts on HappyBeagle.com about our Republican Congressional candidate, Tan Nguyen. Here's one of Kevin's posts, here's another one, and here's one of mine, for example. Up until now, Tan has been merely an annoyance with his flourescent green signs adorning every street corner and rather sad campaign flyers. He's up against incumbant Democrat Loretta Sanchez (actually the only Democratic representative in Orange County) and his sad little campaign has been pretty much doomed from the start, not being able to even come close to Rep. Sanchez. Therefore it was kind of fun to poke at him a little.

Well, holy moley, it just became a lot more serious. Joining the ever-increasing list of Huge Mistakes Made by Republicans this century, Tan now finds himself the target of a major investigation for voter intimidation. And it's pretty clear he's indeed to blame.

Essentially he (allegedly) faked some letterhead from a well-known anti-immigration organization here. He then culled his list of voters to identify Latino voters (press reports say that the number could be as high as 14,000 Democrats) and sent them a letter in Spanish telling them that it's illegal for immigrants to vote. These were sent to naturalized US citizens with full voting rights. He also asserted that federal officials have a database that tracks voters and that anti-illegal immigration groups have access to it (which is actually not true).

Oh my.

The mind boggles at the collosal stupidity here. After it was definitively linked to Tan's campaign, Tan claimed that it was the product of a renegade staffer who has now been fired. Unfortunately for Tan, Scott Baugh, chairman of the Orange County Republican Party, stated publicly that he knows it came straight from Tan.

Ouch.

The ironic thing is that Tan himself is an immigrant, and had another candidate sent out a similar letter, he probably would have been the recipient of one.

Voter intimidation is a federal crime and carries a maximum penalty of 3 years in prison. That's gotta suck.

Adding to the stupidity is that not only did Tan send out such an idiotic letter, he wasn't even smart enough to cover his tracks. The bulk-mail permit he used was the same on he used to send out the rest of his campaign material. In addition, his campaign financial disclosures indicate that he paid for data sorts from the registrar's voter database, which would clearly enable him to weed out the Democrat Latinos.

At any rate I bet District Republicans are really, really sorry they chose him in the primaries.

Orange County Register Article
Another OC Register Article
The Denial
LA Times article

Whoa! Tan made the Associated Press! From the opening page of Yahoo! News.