U.S. Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, "guaranteed" there would be congressional hearings after the election on what he called widespread reports of voter fraud in Ohio and elsewhere.

It's not an idle threat: the St. Clairsville congressman chairs the Committee on House Administration, which has jurisdiction over electoral reform. He was a co-author of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which was supposed to eliminate the voting problems in Florida that tainted the 2000 presidential election.

Ney said that every fraudulent vote cast dilutes the vote of honest voters and is just as serious as any effort to suppress the vote. He blamed Democratic-affiliated "shadowy 527" groups - such as Move On and America Coming Together - that are funded by billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros.

"This isn't the fault of the boards (of election), it's the fault of one rich guy trying to alter the direction of the nation, frankly, without any regard for how boards of elections are run," Ney said.

The Democratic groups said the Republican zeal to investigate voter fraud belied their true agenda.

"We've learned in the last couple of weeks that 800,000 new voters have been registered, and the Republican party is terrified that thousands of new voters will come out and vote," said Jess Goode, a spokesman for America Coming Together.

But Republicans point to a long list of voter-registration problems in Ohio this year, including:

• In Hamilton County, the Board of Elections has subpoenaed 19 registered voters who elections officials don't believe exist. The registration cards were turned in by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which says the man who collected them is no longer employed there.

• The Summit County Board of Elections in Akron has asked Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro to investigate 803 allegedly fraudulent voter-registration cards, many of which appeared to be in the same handwriting.

• In Lake County, east of Cleveland, several voter-registration cards seem to have forged signatures, elections officials say. The problems include a form of an elderly women whose signature - an "X" - was replaced with a perfectly legible signature, and a man dead for 20 years who was reincarnated as a 22-year-old new voter.

• In four central Ohio counties, the number of registered voters surpasses the voting-age population - the result, officials believe, of voters who have moved away and have not yet been "purged" from the system, and of thousands of duplicate voter-registration cards turned in by overzealous registration efforts.

Democrats don't deny there are problems, but say they're isolated incidents and elections officials are dealing effectively with fraud.

"Democrats see this issue a little differently," said U.S. Rep. Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., a former House minority leader. He met with Democratic lawyers in Cincinnati Thursday to help coordinate an Election Day effort to make sure no one is turned away at the polls.

"No one is in favor of voter fraud, but the much bigger problem is with voter suppression," he said.

E-mail gkorte@enquirer.com