I apologize in advance for my sadly insufficient commentary, but I think this needs wider exposure ... I had not even thought of this possibility.
From The Smirking Chimp:
Mark Crispin Miller: 'How to pre-empt a 'November Surprise'
In a nutshell:
If the GOP should lose the House and/or the Senate on Election Day, they will pick out a handful of the "closest" races--as many as they need to hang on to majority control--and start to scream like hell about ELECTION FRAUD.
This sounds like a classic Rovian maneuver to me.
Of course there's more:
That's right: the major perpetrators of such fraud will cast themselves as victims of the very crime that put them where they are, and charge the Democrats with having used the very tactics that the Bush Republicans have now perfected: legal/bureaucratic disenfranchisement, e-voting manipulation, hostile challenges to would-be voters, covert efforts at disinformation, countless ballots thrown away, and so on.
This is what we'll hear non-stop from Rush, O'Reilly, Hannity and Coulter; Hastert, Boehner, Sensenbrenner, Graham and Coburn; even Bush and Cheney and Karl Rove himself.
...
In other words, the Bush Republicans will certainly succeed--unless the Democrats, and others to their left, start working to pre-empt that strategy right now. The only way to foil that plan is to define the conflict truthfully and clearly, and to begin to do it now. However low the Bush regime may sink in the opinion polls, the Democrats, and all the rest of us, are simply cooked, if they do not stand up like vertebrates, and speak as patriots, and tell the nation the unpleasant truth: that these BushRepublicans are where they are today because they have committed vast election fraud, in 2000, and in 2002, and in 2004; and that they lately have committed it again in San Diego, and have more planned in Texas, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, California and Virginia, and wherever else they have the system rigged, whether at the state or county level. In short, it's time to cut the crap, stop worrying about the epithet "sore losers" (the Republicans would never let that stop them), and trot out all the evidence that the Establishment has thus far largely waved away.
The beginning of my conversion to a full time tinfoil-hat wearing fraud believer was when I heard "hanging chad" 14 times in one day, it just rang so false ... of course I now know this a sure sign of GOP talking points.
There is FAR more evidence of election fraud now than there was then and still we hear almost nothing from the mainstream media ... so what are we and our supposed Democratic Leaders going to do about it?
After watching Gore and Kerry fold like toy accordions after their respective "losses," I have no confidence whatsoever that we could recover from this scenario after the fact. We would have already lost. This means we have to do something about this before the election ... as in now.
I don't know how much any of our work is worth if we cannot also stop Republican Election Theft Syndrome.
Again, I am sorry that I am not one of those brilliant political minds that can analyze this issue and suggest myriad courses of action. I am really much better suited to short snarky comments, bad photoshops, and of course pootie pics ... but this is where you all come in.
Can we pre-empt this possibility ... maybe even make it work for us somehow?
Please, tell me, what can we do?