GOP Stealing Massachussetts?

After Florida '00, Ohio '04 and all the intimidation from McCain "supporters" in the Blue Collar Blue States, it should be pretty clear that GOP concern about "voter fraud" and "stealing elections" is classic projection. It's well known that the modern conservative movement, post-Goldwater, is all about keeping voter turnout low. Full democracy favors the left, especially in a well-educated populace.

Well, although many polls suggest a Brown victory, GOP supporters and operatives seem to be up to their old tricks ...

Engaging local operatives in widespread ballot fraud:

“I was handed a ballot and when I went to fill it out I saw that the bubble next to Brown’s name was already filled in,” Volynskaya, who voted today in Brighton. Election workers, she added, promised her they “were going to look into how this happened.”

And suppressing votes:

Messages posted on Coakley’s campaign Facebook include these vicious sentiments: “Scott Brown should rape Martha Coakley and then deny her emergency contraception’’. “Martha Coakley getting raped would complete my life.’’ “Abortion is wrong. Kill her.’’ After one message that states “Looking forward to the rally Friday, Martha,’’ a woman named Amelia Bosley writes:“Hope she gets shot.’’ Imagine putting your name to that in the name of political change.

...

Turnout is key. The Democrat’s best hope is a strong ground game.

That’s why Brown supporters are trying to suppress the vote, by bullying and making Coakley supporters believe the cause is hopeless.

That’s the picture Brown is trying to paint. It isn’t pretty, like a lot of his campaign.

Update: Sullivan assesses the implications of a Brown victory:

What the current FNC/RNC machine wants you to have is total amnesia about the recent past, an iron grip on ideology and abstraction - government always bad, Democrats always socialists - and a tactical delight in playing the political game, even if it means no accountability for their own past, no engagement with reality, no openness to change or constructive reform.

This is the deeper war here. Which means it is essential that Obama find a way to rescue health insurance reform from the Rovian nihilists.

Update 2: Sullivan's on a tear:

For Rovians, the entire game of politics is just that: a game. And it's a game we all have to resist being sucked into (excitable moi especially).

You create reality by spin and hysteria and a 24-hour propaganda channel. The actual reality - the anachronism of Reaganomics in our current moment, the need to cut spending and raise taxes, the enmeshment of the previous administration is war crimes, the crippling burden of a broken healthcare system, the role of carbon in unsettling our climate - is too complicated for them to grapple with. So they create a game and they play it, with no accountability for their own past, fear-mongering on terror, denial on torture, and recitation of the same bromides that were very relevant in 1980 but are part of the problem now.

Obama will stay cool, get his Senate health bill through the House, and move on to financial re-regulation and economic revival. If the Democrats in the House balk at this, they have to be nuts. They will be buying into the Rovian psych-out. And I don't believe that so many worked so hard for Obama so recently in order to restore the logic and priorities of Rovian cynicism. Sprung has more thoughts here.

Update 3: The Coakley campaign has dispatched the lawyers on this issue.