It was a procedure that produced a bumper crop of new voters:

Just before Santa Clara County immigrants were sworn in as U.S. citizens, they got voter-registration cards and were shown how to fill them out. At the conclusion of the naturalization ceremony, most new citizens had signed the cards and handed them in to become registered voters.

But in March, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services declared that the county registrar of voters must not hand out those cards until the recipients are officially citizens. And now voter registration has plunged by 82 percent.

“Everybody’s really disappointed,” said Diane Moore, precinct operations division manager for the county registrar’s office. “Before this processing change, we were one of the models in the state of California. We did this with a great amount of pride.”

With new citizens unable to fill out the cards at their own pace during the ceremony, registrar workers found it nearly impossible to catch the new citizens as they rushed toward the door after the ceremony to get back to jobs or to family obligations.

Plus, one Citizenship and Immigration Services staffer has been “telling new citizens to leave the building while they are still filling out their voter registration cards,” according to an internal county memo obtained by the Mercury News.

The impact was definitive: The county registered 3,140 new voters at naturalization ceremonies in the four months before the new policy went into effect, but only 557 new voters registered in the four months since. Registrars signed up as many as 65 percent of new citizens before the change, but just 8 percent registered at the most recent ceremony in June.

Outraged reaction

The new policy by the agency, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, has caused outrage among local League of Women Voters volunteers as well as local congressional representatives.

“Homeland Security has no jurisdiction over this. They can’t limit voter registration,” said U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, chairwoman of the House Judiciary immigration subcommittee. “Who do they think they are?”

Some are concerned that the new policy is an attempt to suppress voter participation by new citizens.

“For me, it’s strictly political,” said Socorro Reyes-McCord, a member of the county registrar’s voting rights advisory committee. Government officials “are trying to keep these newly naturalized citizens out of the electoral process.”

Federal officials deny that charge. But Citizenship and Immigration Services has not forced other Bay Area county registrars, who began using Santa Clara County as a model in distributing voter registration cards during naturalization ceremonies in San Francisco, to change their procedures.

Santa Clara County officials say they were notified March 19 in a telephone call from Francis D. Siciliano, then-director of the agency’s San Jose field office, that a lawsuit filed against the Department of Homeland Security was forcing the change.

Siciliano, who retired July 3, said in an interview Friday that he had received a memo from his superiors in Washington, D.C., saying it would be inappropriate for citizens-to-be to receive registration materials until they had actually taken the oath of citizenship.

“It was a technicality,” he said, but added that he couldn’t recall which official in Washington sent the memo, or who had filed the lawsuit that prompted it.

He said politics were not involved. “None whatsoever, to be very honest with you,” he said.

Sharon Rummery, a Citizenship and Immigration Services spokeswoman, also said she could not identify the source of the lawsuit, or confirm that it exists. As to charges that an official with the agency has been pushing new citizens to leave the building as they were trying to register, Rummery said: “There’s no indication that has happened, but we do encourage people to make a complaint if they feel something’s been done that isn’t right.”

Rummery said, however, that one reason for the policy change was that the registration effort was contributing to a crowding problem at the naturalization ceremonies.

“It’s a choice based on the logistics of the facility,” she said. “The logistics of this has to be something that’s workable to us. We do have a certain amount of latitude” in deciding when registrars distribute registration materials.

Thousands of new citizens

Once held at the Civic Auditorium in downtown San Jose, the Santa Clara County naturalization ceremonies have recently been held monthly in the Campbell Heritage Theater. Citizenship and Immigration Services holds three separate ceremonies on each swearing-in day, each with 400 to 500 people. But because of the huge jump in the number of citizenship applications last year, the agency expects to naturalize – in Santa Clara County – as many as 10,000 new citizens in special ceremonies in August.

Registrar officials say they used the “down time” before the naturalization ceremonies to give a PowerPoint presentation showing how to complete a voter-registration affidavit. It made the process go smoothly, particularly for immigrants who are still struggling with English, registrar officials said. Bilingual assistance was also made available.

Santa Clara Registrar of Voters Jesse Durazo said workers still give the PowerPoint presentation. But it’s problematic because the citizens-to-be don’t have voter registration cards in front of them.

“In fairness, there are some places in the country to that the CIS doesn’t allow the registrar of voters to be present,” Durazo said. “We’re fortunate in that we at least have a presence.”

Lawsuit or no lawsuit, U.S. Rep. Sam Farr, D-Salinas, said he’s mystified.

“It’s ironic that the agency tasked with promoting citizenship in our country would throw up obstacles to voting, one of the fundamental actions of a citizen,” he said. “DHS should be trying to make the process easier, not harder.”