Nobody in the South Carolina Democratic Party had ever heard of Alvin Greene, the jobless candidate for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination, before he reportedly defeated state legislator Vic Rawl last Tuesday. That, despite the jobless candidate’s lack of actual campaigning, campaign website, or even spending any money on a campaign as far as anyone can tell. And there remain questions at this hour, as to where he even came up with the $10,440 filing fee to get on the ballot in the first place. Greene’s interview on MSNBC last night is one of the most bizarre ever seen on television (full video posted at end of article).
Unless something changes between now and November, however, Greene’s inexplicable victory will pit him against the state’s often-controversial, and far-Rightwing Republican incumbent, Sen. Jim DeMint.
But where some have suggested Greene was a “plant” in the race, experts now examining the actual election result data from both SC’s unverifiable Election Day touch-screen machines and its electronically counted paper-ballot absentee voting system are noting “curious” and even “staggering” disparities, suggesting what some Election Integrity experts are describing at this hour as “clear signs of ELECTION FRAUD in South Carolina”…
The ‘Plant’ Theory
SC’s Democratic U.S. House Rep. Jim Clyburn has suggested Greene may be a “plant” by the GOP, though Greene has denied that. Clyburn also believes, with some interesting evidence to back it up, that the candidate who ran unsuccessfully him, and even a third candidate on the ballot last Tuesday, might similarly be plants.
But the “plant” theory doesn’t explain the extraordinary numbers that Greene reportedly received at the polls on Tuesday, if not in the absentee voting. While it’s possible all of this could be an issue of dirty tricks by Republicans who are allowed to vote in SC’s open primary, there were, apparently, no known efforts by the GOP to push for Greene votes — certainly not enough to account for the staggering 59 to 41 victory Greene reportedly sailed to on Tuesday.
‘Staggering’ E-Vote ‘Red Flags’
So, what else, besides or in addition to the “plant” theory, could account for Greene’s remarkable “victory”?
South Carolina uses ES&S’ 100% unverifiable Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, in this case touch-screen) voting machines at the polling place. The machines, also used in many other states (such as Arkansas, where we recently reported exclusively on the disappearance of thousands of votes on May 18th, which neither state nor local officials are able to explain to this day) are both oft-failed and easily manipulated in such a way that it’s almost impossible to detect the systems have been gamed.
As we’ve written, nearly every time there is an election in South Carolina, whoever the machines end up announcing as the “winner,” will likely be the winner, since there is literally no way to guarantee that even a single vote ever cast on such machines was actually recorded as per the voter’s intent. It’s an insane way to run a democracy, as The BRAD BLOG has spent years, and literally thousands of articles, trying to point out.
Last night, we snarkily Tweeted to that end:
Today, however, we’re delighted to see that actual mainstream media are beginning to note the disparities in the patterns of absentee paper-ballot voting versus the polling place results as cast and recorded on ES&S’s 100% faith-based voting machines — the very same machines which have been decertified in state after state, based on repeated scientific reports on their multiple vulnerabilities.
The disparities being found by “three different teams” of unnamed “national academic experts,” in their early comparisons between result patterns in the Election Day DRE-tallied “ballots” and the optically-scanned absentee paper ballots are already startling, and raising serious red flags suggesting electronic vote tampering…even as reported in the corporate mainstream media today.
As reported by Politico this morning (yes, Politico!):
According to [Rawl campaign manager Walter] Ludwig, of the state’s 46 counties, half have a disparity of greater than 10 percentage points between the absentee and election day ballots.
“The election day ballots all favor Mr. Greene. We don’t know what it means,” Ludwig said in an interview. “We did significantly better on absentees than Election Day, which is according to the mathematicians, quite significant. The other reason is, it didn’t happen in any other races on the ballot.”
In Lancaster County, Rawl won absentee ballots over Greene by a staggering 84 percent to 16 percent margin; but Greene easily led among Election Day voters by 17 percentage points.
In Spartanburg County, Ludwig said there are 25 precincts in which Greene received more votes than were actually cast and 50 other precincts where votes appeared to be missing from the final count.
“In only two of 88 precincts, do the number of votes Greene got plus the number we got equal the total cast,” Ludwig said.
Greene also racked up a 75 percent or greater margin in one-seventh of all precincts statewide, a mark that Ludwig notes is even difficult for an incumbent to reach.
Those are some remarkable numbers already, and we even heard them picked up by MSNBC earlier today (yes, MSNBC!)
‘Rigging the Machines’
Election integrity experts — those who are wiling to actually be named — are already drawing a bead on SC’s e-voting system, as much, or more so, than the “plant” theory.
NYU media professor Mark Crispin Miller, author of two books on the issue, Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform
“With DRE machines deployed statewide (and op-scans used to “count” the absentee ballots), stealing Greene’s race would be a cinch,” Miller wrote. “Nor is there any reason whatsoever to believe the numbers tossed out by ES&S, the right-wing private company that makes and maintains both those DREs and op-scans.”
Miller quotes an email from Jonathan Simon, co-founder and Executive Director of the Election Defense Alliance, asking “Let’s assume Greene was a plant, how does that get him 59% of the votes statewide?”
Simon, a long-time critic of e-voting, known for reporting on the extraordinary and still-unexplained disparities between Election Night results and Exit Polls in the 2004 Presidential race, suspects foul-play on the machines.
“[Greene] was a complete unknown to all voters, D and R. There was no campaign, period, certainly not to Democratic voters, and no evidence at all of one to GOP voters urging them to crossover vote in the D primary (the strategy that was credited with some bizarre results in D primaries in 2008).”
“So, whether Greene was or a plant or not can’t really be the issue: you can plant a guy in a race but you can’t get him 59% of the vote — unless you’re rigging the machines.”
He went on to point to the same concerns we’d Tweeted last night in regard to the unverifiable ES&S voting system used across the state, and called for the machines to be impounded immediately for investigation.
“The machines are ES&S no-paper-trail DREs, 100% pure, unadulterated faith-based voting. The only question that I want to ask is why James Clyburn and Keith Olbermann and everybody else are focusing on the candidates, when it is so blatantly obvious that they should be talking about the DRE machines. Time to impound a few of those suckers, assuming the code is not self-deleting.”
The BRAD BLOG has long called for federal law requiring the 22-month retention of all election-related materials to be applied to the sensitive memory cards used in voting systems to both program the “ballot” and record voter preferences. Routinely, those memory cards, which are likely to hold evidence of either manipulation or failure, if there is any in an election, are erased with days or weeks following an election.
Democrats in South Carolina would do well to get to court immediately and ask for not just an impounding of the machines themselves, but of those memory cards before the important information on them is deleted for good.
Will Corporate Media follow the trail this time?
Simon added one other noteworthy thought in his email, regarding the corporate mainstream media’s astounding lack of willingness, generally, to even broach the issue of machine-based election fraud at all.
“AOL ‘Politics Daily’ moderators apparently thought my Comment questioning the veracity of the DRE counts was ‘not a constructive contribution’ to the dialogue and accordingly blocked it from publication. Don’t know whether to cry or laugh. I wonder why the riggers decided to go this far out on the limb: inebriation, stupidity, hubris, or just because they know they can?”
We don’t know, of course, whether there were “riggers” or not at this hour. But we can certainly confirm the corporate media’s years-long propensity to examine every other explanation for such anomalous elections, except for the one which might also be the most obvious.
Neither Simon nor Miller had likely seen Politico’s report yet, as quoted above, when their emails were sent out. That report, though it doesn’t specifically discuss the possibilities of e-voting manipulation out loud, certainly begins to draw an inescapable focus on the possibility — for a refreshing change.
This story sounds as if it is likely to have legs. We’ll see if the corporate mainstream media have the courage — and intellectual honesty — to begin focusing on what would seem to be the obvious first suspect here — the e-voting system — or whether they’ll take a sudden turn, as they often do, and settle for more more speculative reasons for Alvin Greene having “won” the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina.
As ES&S is the largest concealed vote-counting vendor in the nation, and millions of votes will be cast on its systems — and those of the few other companies whose machines are equally vulnerable, but used across the entire nation anyway — between here and November, we won’t be surprised at all if the media determine it’s better to ignore the issue entirely, rather than risk informing the public that the entire voting system on which our “democracy” rests, is built entirely on systems which are easily manipulated in such a way that is virtually impossible to detect…unless one actually bothers to try and do so…
UPDATE 4:54pm PT: Tom Schaller at FiveThirtyEight.com examines another possible explanation for Greene’s “victory,” the idea that it had something to do with race, as Greene is African American and Rawl is white.
Schaller’s findings, based on his statistical analysis of voting patterns in each county compared to the share of non-white registrants in each:
He offers hard data for his conclusion, including details from overwhelmingly white counties that went for Greene in enormous numbers, while majority non-white counties barely gave Greene the edge over Rawl.
He also has an email from Rawl’s campaign manager Ludwig, which offers further details on just how bizarre Greene’s victory was. Here’s a sample:
We, on the other hand, while we didn’t want to spend a lot of money on primary, we did do 220,000 robocalls (including one with Rep. John Spratt), and sent out about 250,000 emails in the five days before election. So, yes, we weren’t well known, but we had gone to 80 events around the state, and Rawl had some public profile previously, especially in Charleston County.
UPDATE 9:08pm PT: FiveThirtyEight’s Tom Schaller follows-up to say that the race is getting “getting weirder by the hour,” to cite new analyses by statisticians suggesting “something smells fishy,” and narrowing down the possibilities of what could have happened here to just two — one of which involves “a very devious manipulation of the vote returns”. Full details now here…
MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann interviews South Carolina’s mystery Democratic U.S. Senate nominee, Alvin Greene, on 6/10/10…
Maybe, just like in the bp disasters, the lack of safety/security staring the public in their face will register. One can still hope, and anger at the real facts can motivate a duped public!
The election should be audited closely, but you need to realize that neither Greene nor Rawl were well known…
http://publicpolicypolling.blogspot.com/2010/06/greene-situation.html
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Vic Rawl may on paper have clearly been the superior candidate but he wasn’t known much beyond political insider circles. When we polled the South Carolina Senate race two weeks before the primary Rawl had only 4% favorable name recognition with Democrats in the state. We could make up just about any name and ask their favorability on a poll and get 4% so that more or less amounts to zero name recognition.
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According to Ludwig, of the state’s 46 counties, half have a disparity of greater than 10 percentage points between the absentee and election day ballots.
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Wait, so in the other half the absentee follows like the election day? If so, then there is nothing to see here…
Yarrrr wrote:
Then how do you explain the disparities being found between absentee and election day?
Further, are you able to offer a single piece of evidence that anybody — even one voter — actually voted for Greene on Election Day?
(The answer will be “No”. So I’d think that alone would be disturbing you right now, though it doesn’t seem to be.)
The f*ckers overplayed their hand this time. This could be the big one. To anyone with a bullhorn, ride this wave. The electoral fraud here is so obvious we may be able to punch through the corpoRAT press silence.
Yarrrr, lack of name recognition could theoretically explain a lost election, but these anomalies in the results (more votes than voters, paper ballot absentee results wildly different from DRE results, etc) are huge red flags that can not and should not be explained away without investigation. We have seen this happen time and time again, and we really need to get to the bottom of what causes these things.
I came here from your post being on democratic underground. Am noticing in Huff Po and DU people are siting your work , Brad . Garland County in Arkansas is coming up in comments on Huff Po. So election theft is getting out more into the mainstream. Remember reading Hillary Clinton asked SC powers that be if she could win the election.They said no. Then , she didn’t . Guess hatred of Hillary won out over giving the election to a black man.
The point is, as always, WE CAN’T KNOW THE TRUTH, there is no documentation, there is nothing to double check, no chains of custody, no accounting nothing except machines with chips with data.
In a democracy, even the suspicion of fraud that can’t not be double-checked is intolerable. Look at the wide open process MN had in the Franken and Coleman recount, paper ballots to recount, chains of custody to find them all (except on batch of 100 some) physical ballots to review per pre-existing standards on live video feeds, reviews of any gray areas on improperly rejected absentee ballots done by bi/tri partisan ballots and then reviewed by judge panels…and still the REpubs think it was fixed…WHAT DO WE HAVE TO CHECK SC????? Nothing nada except statistical inferences from absentee ballots…here’s an idea, why don’t we have a paper-freaking-ballot for each and ever voter like MN does?
The crime is not that Green stole the election or not, who knows, the crime is we can no, zero, nada confidence in what the computers tell us the vote count was.
If you had a charity and were collecting money at public event and asked everyone to pass thru a donation booth and deposit (or not) a donation, and you had a local kid who programmed the machine to count the money but you could never see the cash deposited…and the next day the kid told, oh, hey you raised $1000, I’m sending it over to you bank account today…would you tolerate that, would you be suspicious the kid pocketed a few thousand. If you asked for proof and the kid showed you an print out of the electronic tally, would this convince you? NO, you would want to see the paper money…but I guess we see our votes as way less valuable than a few thousand dollar bills.
Was this primary manipulated so that the Republican nominee could easily win? Well DUH.
Will this be proven. Not a chance.
Will it be followed up on and dogged like Tiger Woods or any other pop culture story? Nope.
Nothing to see here in our corporate-controlled election process. Move on now.
I’d like to really see the vote count vs the R turnout (signatures) in this primary
The Greene-Olbermann interview is creepy as hell. Something is very wrong here. I also have the feeling the United States will sleep through this incident also.
1. Come up with a sacrificial “Democratic” candidate.
2. Rig the machines so that he wins by an unbelievable margin.
3. Wait for it to blow up on the Democrats. Cry “election fraud!” loudly and repeatedly.
Sounds like classic Rove to me.
With this and the nonsense going on in Texas, maybe we should let the southern states out of the Union after all, include Arizona as a gift to them.
The talk about the machines is a valid consideration and needs to be brought out. They probably used the cards the were intended for DeMint but entered the names in the wrong order. Let us also consider, however, that the man may well be legitimately elected.
I can see protest vote doing that, that the voter knows the ilk of those other guys running and are sure they don’t want them, so they try a shot in the dark. Personally I am enjoying the chagrin of the honkies, but I also might vote for a brother who is being persecuted for enjoying pictures. It would be an interesting term.
It seems to me that if someone was really worried about DREs, and had the ability, one way to make your point in a way that could be ignored would be to rig a fairly high profile election to give obviously fraudulent results. To minimize the harm done by the demonstration, you would try to pick an election where the results wouldn’t matter. A primary contest to pick a candidate for senator from a party that has no chance of winning fits nicely.
Brad, was this result your doing?
correction: could NOT be ignored
hey, sceptic…I have often wished some white hat hacker would do something like this, like wipe the win of a popular Repub incumbent of a minor state position, and give all the votes, in a Red state to the green party…just prove once a for all elections can and are being rigged..
Obviously, the Republicans set this all up to get the candidate they wanted. DeMint will now be the big winner in November and Greene won’t even get 5% of the vote.
And the best thing for the GOP and DeMint is that they won’t even have to rig the machines in November to win, thus avoiding the scrutiny which they are now facing.
black box voting
I think the machines were also manipulated in Arkansas. I live in NC and we have what some say are one of the “better” laws about voting but audits are only done on a state wide race so any congressional seat could be gamed. I still vote but do not trust that my vote will be counted as cast.
Excellent. Thanks for updating the article. Good addition the MSNBC interview.
Also, I see that TechDirt is paying attention to the voting machine issue now.
Red Flags Suggest Potential E-Voting Issues In Bizarre South Carolina Election
from the where’s-the-paper-trail? dept
{Ed Note: Commercial spam deleted.}
So, whether Greene was or a plant or not can’t really be the issue: you can plant a guy in a race but you can’t get him 59% of the vote — unless you’re rigging the machines.”
This. That’s exactly what both parties can’t touch because if they do then they expose that it’s possible to rig a statewide election.
That’s exactly what both parties can’t touch because
Oh don’t you worry your little head, hunny chil’. People are going to go down over this.
This actually will be the example that puts an end to the “a pox on both on both their houses” rhetoric.
I think you are just racist, Brad.
Are you fucking kidding, Lilyputin? Brad a racist? I’m not supposed to call you names, but I have some choice ones right now. Yeah, don’t look at the fraudulent election results because Brad hates black people. What a bunch of horse manure!
this story sounds like a likely alternative lost scene from the Forrest Gump movie where Forrest dies in ‘Nam and Bubba later runs for US Senate on an ‘pro-gumbo’ choice platform.
“Whydya do it Bubba”(Greene)?, asks Foxnews
“felt like running”, says Bubba(Greene)
Brad,
Did the MSM ever investigate the staggering anomalies between Obama’s Election Day vote (52% of 121 million) and his late (59% of 10 million) (paper ballot) votes?
Did they ever investigate this anomaly?
In the last three NY State presidential elections, the Democrat had a 7% higher late (paper ballot) vote share than Election Day, when all votes were cast on levers but counted on central tabulators?http://www.richardcharnin.com/2008LateVotes.htm
It’s all in my book “Proving Election Fraud”.
http://www.amazon.com/Proving-Election-Fraud-Uncounted-National/dp/144908527X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1270518788&sr=8-1
Maybe Alvin Greene is “disoriented” in his interview with Keith because he has Keith in one ear, and someone giving him the answers in the other ear??? Ala Bush-Kerry debates???
TruthIsAll @ 28 wrote:
Why do you consider that an “anomaly”? The Obama campaign and DNC made a considerable effort to push early/absentee/vote-by-mail, and the result (Obama “winning”, as reported, at both polls and via absentee), is the same in both cases. No?
What am I missing there?
Now if Obama had LOST 59/41 in mail, but WON 52/48 on Election Day, that *might* be more indicative of an “anomaly”.
(Note: You and I are both being very general here, obviously, since we’re discussing a national popular election, which has a great number of state-by-state and even county-by-county variables that we’re completely glossing over for purposes of this conversation).
Greene will crack soon, and we’ll find out about how he was recruited by a SC republican group as a plant. I sincerely hope there’s e-mail evidence of a republican conspiracy but they wouldn’t be that stupid, I suppose.
Was this, maybe, a test run to see how far they can go with vote manipulation?
I dunno, Gallup and Zogby have been working overtime to prepare us for a GOP retaking of Congress. Yet, election results thus far do not prove this out. National GOP may realize that Gallup and Zogby are fudging poll numbers, but would they be able to pull off a really, really significant manipulation of vote tallies?
Not if the media ran with the suspicious nature of ballot results. But, if the media lets this obvious and glaring SC election fraud slide by, then they can prepare for a coordinated fraud during the general election and not have to worry about the media.
It is interesting to note that when Keith Olbermann covered this issue at length on Countdown he remained as clueless as ever about the ease with which these “odd numbers” can be produced by a single insider with access to source codes, but then, for long time readers of The Brad Blog, this should come as no surprise.
After all, it was Olbermann who refused to cover the Clint Curtis story entailing a Curtis’s allegation that former FL Republican Congressman Tom Feeney had retained Curtis’s former employer to build a vote-flipping prototype.
Not just Curtis’ former employer Ernest. Recall, they were BOTH employed by Yang for some time. Feeney on legal retainer (while also acting as a state legislator), and Clint as a programmer.
It was Feeney, as Curtis alleges, that requested this prototype vote flipping/manipulating program from Curtis.
And yes, the entire media complex ignored Clint Curtis just as they’ve ignored Sibel Edmonds.
For some reason, they don’t go there.
And worse yet, there are several murders that tie in loosely with Tom Feeney. Just too much dirt and this scumbag Feeney is being protected by someone with lots of juice…
It is well known that Jim DeMint wants to turn the country hard right. This primary was just a practice run to see if his tampering system would work. The obvious plants were used to get people looking and if nobody actually finds what happened, he will know he has a game changer. Now it can be implemented in every other ES&S DRE system in the country. If the plot is exposed, it will never get past a few low level operatives and he will have a cakewalk to his next term. Win-win.
It cost $10,500 just to file? Wow. Does no one question the legali9D401ty of such an exorbitant fee?
I just still can’t believe he got chosen! I mean how does a jobless candidate have the money to file?