That’s the latest from the Alan Webb campaign, by way of Daily Kos.

Of course, Daily Kos is the same website that was telling us yesterday that the GOP was looking at $1 billion in fines for robo-calls in New Hampshire, but that turned out to be a load of bunk too.

The story in Virginia is that some automated phone message is calling people up and telling them that if they vote they’ll get arrested.  You can listen to the call here.

So is this an effort by some right wing group, or even the Allen campaign itself, to keep Democrat voters away from the polls?  Anything is possible, I guess, but I doubt it.

Allegations like this right before an election are nothing new.  Right before the 2004 elections I posted about a flyer which was supposedly being distributed to blacks in Milwaukee to discourage them from voting.  Eventually it came to light that the people who found the flyer just happened to be political operatives working for the AFL-CIO’s get out the vote effort.  No evidence ever emerged to prove that the flyer actually came from people trying to suppress black voters, nor (to my knowledge) were any other flyers like it distributed in Milwaukee.  The only evidence of this vote suppression came from left-wing activists.  Which tells me that the flyer itself was really just a strawman set up by the operatives themselves so that they could attack it.

I suspect that the same will hold true with this recorded phone call.  The only people we know of who got the call reported directly to the Webb campaign, and somehow one of these unsuspecting callers just happened to have equipment handy to record the robo call and digitize it for distribution via the web.  Convenient, no?

To me the whole controversy sounds like an elaborate, last-minute “get out the vote” effort.  “Look at what the bad guys are doing!” it says.  “Get out to the polls so they don’t steal the election!”

These sort of accusations will be flying all over the country tomorrow, but very few of them will be grounded in fact.