Immediately after the last presidential election, leading GOP operatives started gearing up for the next one. One good place to start looking at this is with the so-called "American Center for Voting Rights," which was founded at the start of 2005. (Just google on it -- there's a lot out there.)
Of particular interest are ACVR's cofounders Jim Dyke and "Thor" Hearne, both of whom had been making claims of voter registration irregularities in Ohio during the 2004 elections. (See, for example,
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/29/politics/campaign/29ohio.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&position=&oref=slogin for a 2004 story about Dyke's involvement in Republican attempts to challenge Ohio voter registrations.)
Dyke was RNC communications director in 2003-04, and he and Tim Griffin, who was then the deputy communications director, specialized in things like planting stories about John Kerry's $150 haircuts. (
http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400064472&view=excerpt)
Dyke also set up anti-Kerry websites using the same rnc.com servers that hosted the email accounts used by RNC and White House staff for their off-the-books activities -- such as planning the firing of US Attorneys for not pursuing specious claims of voter fraud.
Tim Griffin, for his part, also directed the 2004 RNC vote caging operation. He later became Karl Rove's assistant in September 2005, then was part of the US Attorney scandal, and has recently surfaced again to recommend that ACORN be prosecuted as a criminal enterprise. (See Glenn Greenwald at
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/10/12/griffin/ for a good rundown on Griffin.)
Hearne served as national counsel to the 2004 Bush campaign, but he'd previously gained attention in 2000 for making claims about voter fraud in Missouri.
Both Dyke and Hearne left their official positions immediately after the 2004 election to create this nominally "non-partisan" voter fraud group, ACVR, which immediately started being called upon as a source of expert testimony by Republicans like Bob Ney.
So, yeah, this is not just a GOP conspiracy -- it's one you don't even have to believe in conspiracy theory to recognize, because it's all out in the open. The same people have been doing the same things for the last four years, and they don't even particularly bother to hide it.