Plum Line: Something fishy with some Massachusetts ballots?

As Chris Steller reported this morning, some Republicans, expecting a squeaker in today’s special election in Massachusetts, are already conjuring the Franken/Coleman contest to predict a “stolen election.” The Plum Line has early indications that perhaps there’s some merit to it — only on the other side of the aisle: Two voters say they were handed ballots that had the box beside Republican Scott Brown’s name already filled in.

From Greg Sargent’s report:

“Scott Brown’s bubble was already filled in,” the software engineer, Aaron Kemp, 28, tells me by phone. “I handed it back to them and asked, ‘Can I have a clean ballot, please?’”

The workers at the polling place in the Lexington Avenue Firehouse “were very surprised,” Kemp says, adding that he asked them to look through the other ballots to see if any others had a bubble filled in. “They looked through and they didn’t see any other ones,” he says.

Kemp says the area is very Democratic, and he worries that other voters might get a similar ballot without noticing, fill in Martha Coakley’s name, and submit a ballot with two names filled in, rendering it ineligible. But he says he thinks it was more likely a foul up than fraud. And, obviously, this is only one example.

A second voter, 34-year-old Julia Volynskaya, contacted Sargent saying she had the same experience.

“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,” she said.