The prosecution rested Thursday after presenting four...

The prosecution rested Thursday after presenting four days of testimony in the preliminary hearing for former county Registrar of Voters Ray Ortiz, charged with grand theft and misappropriation of public funds in the alleged manipulation of a county printing contract.

As is typical in such proceedings, the attorneys for Ortiz and his co-defendants, Maria Caldera and Lance Gough, called no witnesses in the hearing before San Diego Municipal Judge Nicholas Kasimatis.

After hearing arguments by the lawyers, Kasimatis is expected to decide today whether sufficient evidence was presented to require Ortiz and the others to go on trial in Superior Court on the felony charges.

Ortiz is charged with 27 counts related to the alleged misuse of a county contract with Jeffries Printing Co. of Los Angeles to cover up thousands of dollars in unrelated expenses.

Caldera, a longtime friend of Ortiz, is charged with three counts of grand theft. Gough, an elections consultant sporadically employed by the registrar’s office, is charged with a single count of grand theft.

In the final hours of testimony Thursday, Deputy Dist. Atty. Douglas Gregg played a barely audible tape recording of a July interview with Caldera by an investigator for the district attorney’s office. On the tape, Caldera was heard acknowledging that that statements on a bill she submitted to Jeffries were “a lie” and that Ortiz had told her what to write on the invoice. She also told the investigators that $4,000 paid to her by Jeffries had nothing to do with work on sample ballots, as paper work submitted to Jeffries and the county claimed.