An investigation is under way to determine whether any laws were broken when a Web site made to look like the local Democratic Party's own came online with endorsements of Republican candidates for local offices, District Attorney Bob Lee said Thursday.

The mock site, www.cruzdemocrats.com, was a mirror image of the legitimate site, www.cruzdemocrats.org, including the same graphics, logo and a photograph of Watsonville lawyer Luis Alejo.

A reporter for the Santa Cruz weekly newspaper Good Times searched Web registration databases and linked the site to an Aptos resident and elected member of the county's Republican Central Committee who also sits on the committee's Web board.

Bob Berlage, chair of the Santa Cruz County Republican Party, said he was unaware of the mock site.

"If anything remotely like this had come up at our meetings, people would've screamed bloody murder," he said.

The site, which was registered in April according to the Good Times, was taken down Friday after inquiries made to Republican Party members.

Berlage said he never saw the dummy site but is interested to see what the district attorney turns up. If a Republican member were found responsible, "that's something we would obviously look at very seriously," he said. He declined to say whether that person would be asked to resign his position.

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Lee said his office was looking at a variety of penal code violations in response to information passed on by local Democrats, including photographs of the now defunct site.

Gail Pellerin, county elections manager, pointed to one possibly applicable law on the books called the California Political Cyberfraud Abatement Act.

Mock-up sites pretending to be official corporate or government Web pages have proliferated in the past few years, according to Anita Ramasastry, a professor at the University of Washington School of Law. In addition to using basic software like Photoshop, the activist-prankster group called The Yes Men has developed and made available, a simple "parody-ware" software program that can grab and reproduce images off Web sites.

Local Democrats had assumed the central committee's Web site ending with the ".com" belonged to Democrats and that visitors were automatically redirected to the official site.

Contact Roger Sideman at rsideman@santacruzsentinel.com.

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