GINGRICH INTIMATES GROWING FRAUD IN SANCHEZ PROBE.

Byline: Lizette Alvarez N.Y. Times News Service

Speaker Newt Gingrich suggested Thursday that evidence of voter fraud was mounting in the election of Rep. Loretta Sanchez, the Democrat who defeated Robert Dornan, an incumbent Republican, in California last year. The accusation outraged Democrats and prompted them to rally anew around Sanchez.

``We now have proof of a sufficient number of noncitizens voting that it may well have affected at least one election for Congress,'' Gingrich said at a breakfast with reporters, alluding to the Sanchez-Dornan race.

But at an afternoon news conference, Rep. Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., the minority leader, led several House Democrats in accusing the Republicans of turning the House investigation of Sanchez's election into a witch hunt against immigrant voters and using their power to try to intimidate Latino voters across the nation.

``Nearly a year after the 1996 elections, Loretta Sanchez and the people of the 46th District of California are still being denied resolution to the partisan warfare being waged by a bitter Republican opponent and a politically motivated House Oversight Committee,'' Gephardt asserted.

For nearly 10 months the House Oversight Committee, led by Rep. Bill Thomas, R-Calif., has been investigating Dornan's allegations of voter fraud. Sanchez, a political novice, won the seat from Dornan, a veteran conservative lawmaker, by 984 votes. He has contended that hundreds of ballots were cast by an array of ineligible voters, including people who were not citizens.

The House committee, which held its first meeting in months Wednesday, is continuing its investigation, but so far has produced no vote counts to support the allegations.

Investigators have relied primarily on records from Immigration and Naturalization Service databases on citizenship, which they are cross-checking with voter rolls in the 46th District, in Orange County.

But Thomas and others on the committee have accused the immigration agency of stalling the investigation by failing to turn over its records in a timely and complete fashion.

Much of the Democrats' exasperation centers on the methodology of the inquiry. They say the immigration agency's databases are duplicative and cannot be relied upon to verify voter rolls and to conclusively determine which voters were not U.S. citizens at the time of the election. The inquiry, Gephardt said, should have ended long ago.

But Republicans say they have evidence of voter irregularity and they vow to continue working to uncover the depth of any fraud.