A formal challenge to the announced results of South Carolina’s Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate has now been filed by Judge Vic Rawl, the candidate who wasn’t announced the winner by the state’s oft-failed, easily-manipulated, 100% unverifiable ES&S e-voting system.
Rawl released an official statement on his website today, in conjunction with the filing and a press conference he held in Charleston this afternoon.
The statement points generally to a number of findings being made by the campaign as independent experts have analyzed the results, voting patterns and problems being reported by poll workers and voters on Election Day where the unknown, unemployed candidate Alvin Greene defeated Rawl on the unverifiable ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting systems, performing 11 points better on those machines than he did in the paper-based absentee results. The oft-failed, easily-manipulated ES&S election results reporting system gave Greene a 59% to 41% “victory” over Rawl.
Greene did no campaigning, had no name recognition, had no campaign website, faces felony obscenity charges and managed, somehow, according to the electronic results, to best Rawl, a four-term state legislator to win the nomination to face incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint in this November’s general election.
We’ve covered details and analysis of this bizarre matter in two previous articles since last Tuesday’s election:
- ‘Experts’ Eye 100% Unverifiable E-Vote System in ‘Win’ of SC’s Mystery U.S. Senate Nominee
- UPDATE: More Statisticians Focus on ‘Tampering, Malfunction’ of E-Vote System in SC Primary
As you’ll see below, Rawl’s official statement today reads as an indictment of the state’s electronic voting system and, frankly, as a summary of years of The BRAD BLOG’s oft-ignored reporting (and warnings) about the ES&S e-voting system’s disastrously failed record…
From Rawl’s statement [emphasis added]:
There is a cloud over Tuesday’s election. There is a cloud over South Carolina, that affects all of our people, Democrats and Republicans, white and African-American alike.
At this point, the people of our state do not have the basic confidence that their vote will be counted.
The strange circumstances surrounding Tuesday’s vote require a thorough investigation. For better or worse, this protest process is the only platform currently available for that investigation.
And let me be clear: regardless of the outcome of this protest, a full and unblinking investigation of this election and the overall integrity of South Carolina’s election system must go forward. Whether our protest is upheld or not, I intend to bring my full energies to electoral reform well into the future.
I want to speak briefly about the bases for our protest.
First is ongoing analysis of the election returns themselves, which indicate irregularities.
Second are the many voters and poll workers who continue to contact us with their stories of extremely unusual incidents while trying to vote and administer this election.
These range from voters who repeatedly pressed the screen for me only to have the other candidate’s name appear, to poll workers who had to change program cards multiple times, to at least one voter in the Republican primary who had the Democratic U.S. Senate race appear on her ballot.
For those who experienced problems voting, I urge you to go to our website, www.vicrawl.com and use the form there to report them. You can also call our Election Integrity Hotline at 843-278-0510.
Third is the well-documented unreliability and unverifiability of the voting machines used in South Carolina.
It is worth noting that these machines were purchased surplus from Louisiana after that state outlawed them.
The full details of our protest will be presented on Thursday.
For the people of South Carolina, getting to the bottom of Tuesday’s results will build confidence, either way.
I also hope that a full and frank discussion of our voting system will result in substantial reform.
At the risk of repetition, this protest is not about me, or my personal political fortunes. Indeed, if the protest is upheld and a new election ordered, I have not decided whether to run in it.
But, either way, I am not done with the issue of fixing our elections.
We’ll briefly hit several of those points one at a time:
“At this point, the people of our state do not have the basic confidence that their vote will be counted.“
Rawl is correct. There is no basis for confidence in the results of the election, or any held on 100% unverifiable Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) voting machines. There exists no proof that Greene won this election. Period.
We have asked readers — and, more importantly, election officials, elected officials, and voting machine vendors — for years to offer any evidence that any vote ever cast on an DRE during any election has ever been recorded as per any voter’s intent. No such evidence has been profferred, because no such evidence exists. These are 100% faith-based voting systems, and we persist in using them in dozens of states across the country for reasons we are still unable to fathom.
Whether the results are actually accurate or not is beside the point. It is strictly impossible for any citizen to know if they are or aren’t. Period.
“[O]ngoing analysis of the election returns themselves, which indicate irregularities.”
In each of our previous posts on this election (here and here), we detailed findings from independent academic experts examining the results.
Among those findings, the brightest red-flag would be the 11-point disparity between paper-based absentee results and Election Day touch-screen results. According to a statement released by Rawl’s campaign last last week, “This difference is a clear contrast to the other races.” Politico reported, for example, “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.”
Two articles from the political statistics website FiveThirtyEight.com (first here, the here) examined a number of independent statistical analyses of results, finding that neither mischievous Republican crossover voters, nor racial preferences (Rawl is white and Greene is African-American, though most voters didn’t know that about either candidate) are able to fully explain the results.
Writing at FiveThirtyEight, Tom Schaller ultimately narrowed the existing possibilities for explaining the explaining the results to just two. Scenario A: A combination of African-American voters possibly recognizing the name “Greene”, spelled with an “e” at the end, as an African-American surname and his ballot position as the first candidate in the race, combined with a low number of voters who knew of, but disapproved of Rawl. Or Scenario B: “Somebody with access to software and machines engineered a very devious manipulation of the vote returns.”
We added “Scenario B.1” to Schaller’s possibilities: Out-and-out machine failure, given the documented history of such failures on these precise voting machines. Rawl’s second listed reason for his challenge underscore that point…
“[V]oters and poll workers [report] extremely unusual incidents while trying to vote…”
Rawl’s statement notes “voters who repeatedly pressed the screen for me only to have the other candidate’s name appear” and (extremely disturbing) “poll workers who had to change program cards multiple times”, as well as “at least one voter in the Republican primary who had the Democratic U.S. Senate race appear on her ballot.”
Every single one of the incidents mentioned above has occurred time and again across the United States over the last several election cycles and has generally been ignored by both election officials and candidates.
The most well-known example is the 2006 U.S. House special election in Florida’s 13th Congressional district, where some 18,000 votes disappeared entirely on ES&S iVotronic touch-screen machines in Democratic candidate Christine Jennings stronghold county of Sarasota. Despite the extraordinary and still-unexplained undervote rate, Republican Vern Buchanan was announced the winner by just 369 votes.
In that race, scores of voters and poll workers had come forward, on Election Day, to report votes flipping from one candidate to another, as well as the inability to select Jennings at all. Even the wife of Buchanan had reported difficulties in selecting her husband on the touch-screen “ballot”.
Though neither a state-sponsored investigation nor an investigation by the U.S. GAO was able to find a certain explanation for what happened, Democrats in the U.S. House ultimately dismissed Jennings challenge to the race under the Federal Contested Elections Act.
Nonetheless, FL’s then incoming Republican Gov. Charlie Crist and FL’s Democratic Rep. Robert Wexler worked together after the incident to pass a bill in the state legislature which largely outlawed the use of touch-screen voting systems entirely in the Sunshine State.
That, and other states, such as Ohio and Colorado, who also commissioned reports which found the ES&S systems to be highly error-prone and easily manipulated, did not dissuade their use in South Carolina. Nor did a county-wide failure of the machines in SC’s 2008 Republican primary. Nor even the federal conviction of 6 high-ranking election officials — including the County Clerk, an Circuit Court Judge and the County Superintendent — earlier this year, in March, after it had been found that they had actually changed the votes of voters on the ES&S touch-screen systems themselves after voters left the booth in 2006.
As to Rawl’s statement concerning “poll workers who had to change program cards multiple times,” The BRAD BLOG has reported time and again over the years about this insane and disturbing practice. We even contributed a full chapter to Sonoma State University’s book Censored 2010: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2008-09
That problem has occurred now, year after year — even as recently as Arkansas’ May 18th Arkansas general primary, as we reported at the time, as testified to in affidavit by a Circuit Court Judge and one of his clerks.
When these systems are in “election mode”, they are extremely vulnerable to tampering and there is no reason that any official, or voting machine company employee should ever be able to access those cards at that time. The proper solution would be to pull such problem machines from use, so they can be examined later. That very rarely happens, however, since the precincts which rely on these machines rarely have enough paper ballots available to make up for the difference, or proper procedures in place to assure the secure chain-of-custody of such ballots.
“At least one voter in the Republican primary who had the Democratic U.S. Senate race appear on her ballot.”
Electronic voting systems are notorious for presenting the wrong ballots to voters. Often, the voter has no idea.
This has now happened twice, even to us, on ES&S electronic voting systems. In 2008’s statewide primary in CA, the system in use in Los Angeles County — which, unlike the one used in SC, actually prints out an inked-in paper ballot representing voter preferences — mis-printed 4 out of 12 of our own votes. Happily, we noticed the failure before officially casting the ballot.
Last week, in the CA’s primary, the same system again failed, as two different machines were unable to offer us the correct ballot to vote on. The system repeated offered a ballot for a precinct, and then a party, that we shouldn’t have been voting in. Once again, following the ES&S voting machine failure, we were allowed to vote on a paper ballot, which is a right for California voters.
“[W]ell-documented unreliability and unverifiability of the voting machines used in South Carolina.”
The points detailed above underscore Rawl’s point here, but his quote is worth noting again — particularly the part about the machines “unverifiability”.
We have opined, year after year after year, that, in the end, it doesn’t actually matter whether these systems report accurate results or not. The bottom line is that there is no way for voters to know that they did. That alone is a grave threat to democracy, and one of the reasons why we continue to hear of more and more such questions about results, in each and every election.
At this hour, we do not know whether the SC Democratic primary election for the U.S. Senate was gamed or whether machine malfunction might explain the results. We also do not know that it was legitimately counted as per the voters’ intent. We are seeking proof, not speculation, to support either possibility.
As Rawl correctly notes, “There is a cloud over South Carolina, that affects all of our people, Democrats and Republicans, white and African-American alike.” That applies to the cloud over virtually every election held in the United States on machines made by private companies, which use concealed voting counting to report the results of elections. The same applies even to paper-based elections when the same easily-manipulated, oft-failed electronic tabulators are used to tally them.
We applaud Rawl for his courageous — and patriotic — position, vowing “a full and unblinking investigation” and his stated intent to bring his “full energies to electoral reform well into the future.”
To that end, VelvetRevolution.us (an organization co-founded by The BRAD BLOG, in part, to demand electoral reform following years of our reportage on these matters) has hosted a StandingForVoters.org campaign, in support of candidates of any party who vow not to concede their election until all votes are counted, and counted both accurately and transparently. More recently, VR has launched a ProtectOurElections.org campaign, seeking to urge Congress to pass substantive election reform.
Unfortunately, there are currently no bills pending in Congress that would outlaw concealed voting counting, or even the use of proprietary “trade secret” software made by private companies in our public elections, which have now been completely outsourced to such un-overseeable private vendors.
Over the weekend we attempted to contact the Rawl campaign with a number of questions about their current investigation, and to offer whatever advice and consultation we could. They have yet to return our calls or email.
In his statement today, Rawl promised that “the full details of our protest will be presented on Thursday.”
UPDATE 4:13pm PT: Garance Franke-Ruta’s Washington Post blog coverage today explains the next steps in the process for the formal complaint, as filed today by Rawl, and highlights one absolute absurdity in this entire fine mess…
The complaint now goes to the 92-member South Carolina Democratic Party executive committee, which will consider the protest at a public hearing Thursday in Columbia at which Rawl’s attorney, F. Truett Nettles II of Charleston, will present the campaign’s case. Greene or a representative for him may also attend and present evidence, though he is under no obligation to do so.
It is unclear how many members of the executive body will attend and vote on whether to dismiss Rawl’s case, overturn the election or call for a new one, and there is no quorum number the body must reach before proceeding.
The burden of proof at the hearing will be on Rawl.
That last point, of course, underscores the absurdity of the bulk of U.S. elections.
The proof will be on Rawl to show that the election, held on unverifiable voting machines (unverifiable either way!), was inaccurate.
In the meantime, as we’ve said previously, we are open to anybody’s PROOF that the election results, as reported, actually are accurate — any hard evidence that Greene actually won and Rawl lost. Yet, as election officials and supporters of electronic voting certainly know, there is no such proof.
Why the burden should be on Rawl to prove a negative, rather than for election officials to prove that their system reported voter’s intentions accurately, is just one of the continuing absurdities in the woeful, off-the-rails electoral systems we now use in this country.
Hey Brad –
Why is South Carolina’s electronic “electon night results” site running through a server in Europe?
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.enr-scvotes.org
I see they’ve got two websites — the usual one http://www.scvotes.org — and the “election night” one http://www.enr-scvotes.org.
The first one is registered to SC state elections body and appears to run on a US server.
The second one is registry hidden (GoDaddy) and appears to run on a European server.
The http://www.enr-scvotes.org website appears to have been pressed into use first in 2008?
Do we have the makings of a man-in-the middle attack a la Ken Blackwell from 2004?
(I think I also read that SC’s voter equipment was bought from Louisiana as surplus after that state outlawed e-voting??)
This is the Balloon Boy all over again. I put a thousand dollars down to all betters this was a con job! Anyone in these here United States want to put their money where their mouth is? You get a thousand dollars if the Balloon Boy of South Carolina is telling the truth as testified by the Judge. Any takers for my $1000.00 bet?
As a fairly regular visitor here for most of its existence from the Clint Curtis days, I dont need any more evidence about how absurd it is for a “democracy” to depend on faith-based electronic bullshit. The only part of all 3 articles on the SC debacle that actually caused me to go…WTF??
was the fact, also noted by JD, that the machines in question were deemed too squirrely for LOUISIANA!!?? Wow. Just wow.
Hackable Hardware that not even the Big Easy and environs can tolerate, gamecocks say, hey sure, no problem, we’ll use em. Funny. Ironic. Sad.
Hopefully this is the tip of the iceberg that ends up sinking the USS 100% Unverifiable Titanic.
It’ll be funny if they forget to “recalibrate” (or whatever they do) these machines before the November – if this guy Greene beats De Mint, maybe they’ll think about a paper trail.
Now, now. The Dems must accept that this man won and is now their candidate. He won fair & square. ANYONE who doesn’t recognize Alvin as the candidate of choice is a racist & a bigot of the worst sort! His background and military record are as good – or better – than most of the politicians in the beltway. Heck, if his record and theirs are closely examined, the nation will see that he fits in well.
Now that he is the primary winner, his campaign war chest will grow. Leeches..er investors..will find ways to fund their agendas..(ahem).. his campaign. Right George?
With regard to pubic speaking, he’ll do fine. We’ve proven that teleprompters can make politicians appear intelligent and capable.
Long live the Republic of the United States!
Voting News reported that “Clarity Elections” software was used by South Carolina to report the results.
Clarity Elections is an SOE Software product.
http://www.clarityelections.com
SOE is apparently based in Tampa, FL.
SOE’s executives appear to have zero elections experience – they’re all corporate.
http://www.soesoftware.com/
SOE Software
Corporation
5426 Bay Center Drive
Suite 525
Tampa, FL 33609
Has the Judge filed a Federal Election Contest with Congress? Since Congress has sole Constitutional jurisdiction over the elections, returns, and qualifications of its Members, a Federal Election Protest is the only avenue available to protest a stolen Congressional election, and an FEC can only be filed by a “sore loser.”
Of course Congress cannot fully investigate these Federal Election Contests, because to do so might decrease public confidence in our electoral system and make it more difficult for Members of Congress to get out the vote in their reelection campaigns.
In other words, the Constitution granted sole jurisdiction to people with inherent conflicts of interest.
When Article I, Section 5 was written to make Congress the sole judge of its own elections, returns, and qualifications, it put the foxes in sole charge of the hen house.
Look, imagine a hypothetical scenario that some people in Congress are trying to push through laws to deregulate offshore oil drilling. They have almost, but not quite enough votes. The oil industry sees that two candidates for Congress are in a close race, one favoring deregulation and the other opposed. The Congressional vote has trillions of dollars at stake. There are no voting machines involved–publicly overseen hand-counted paper ballots only. Before the vote tally has been completed, the media (bought and paid for by the oil industry in this case) announces that the deregulation candidate is the winner. The candidate is already in Washington, D.C., and Congress swears the candidate in an hour after the media has announced the results and before the vote count can be completed.
The new Member of Congress votes for deregulation, and everyone is happy. Except for the voters and the losing candidate. When the vote count is completed, it turns out that the other candidate won by a wide margin. So that candidate files a Federal Election Contest with Congress. And, lo and behold, Congress decides that the FEC is moot because they’re already sworn in a candidate and they don’t want to decrease public confidence in elections.
Our Constitution did not give us a democratic form of government, neither a democracy nor a republic nor any other democratic form of government. It gave us an oligarchy–a plutocracy to be more precise–where only the foxes and never the chickens are in charge of the hen house. Only Congress can be the judge of its own elections? The people can vote but they have no right to have their votes counted and no avenue of appeal if their votes are stolen?
No matter how much you sugar coat it, that is still a tyranny, not a democracy or a republic.
jd…i think it is because sc uses a middleman software…bbv has done a report on it
here is there web site
http://www.soesoftware.com/customers.html
the following is a copy from bevs article,
WHAT’S A MIDDLEMAN AND WHY THE CONCERN?
A middleman entity is a person or system that sits in between the votes first counted and the results finally reported. For example, if you were to hand count votes at a polling place, then hand the results sheet to a courier, who then drives the results and ballots somewhere else and reports them, that courier is inserted between the original results and the reported results.
Middlemen are in a position to see the results before they are officially reported, and may be in a position to alter the results before they are reported.
Another example of a middleman is the Central Tabulator computer, which aggregates results. Whoever operates that computer is in a position for “first look” and alteration.
Another example is the company that provides the server which hosts the results when they are posted publicly. As results stream into the server, the owner of the server can get access to the results for first look or alteration.
Over 200 heartbroken voters came forth to testify to the problems they experienced while attempting to vote for Christine Jennings (D) on ES*S’s troubled, paperless iVotronic machines in the 2006 FL-13 Race.
VIDEO – Two 1 min. clips / moving examples of voters citing the very problems voting Brad mentions above, and has been reporting on for years:
http://www.youtube.com/user/nberning#p/u/3/tOtpen7zzS0
http://www.youtube.com/user/nberning#p/u/2/LoFMdxuhZyU
Fantastic video summary of voting machine failures across the country in the 2006 elections (from VIDEO THE VOTE & John Ennis):
http://www.youtube.com/user/jeanniedean#p/u/57/od28M5RnOMI
here is more about the middleman software and who is involved with it>>>>>>>>>>>
marc fratello of soe software previously was part of powercerv..which settled an security exchange fraud case for 1,500,000
Conclusion: According to the firm’s 10-K filing dated April 15, 2003, the parties have agreed to a settlement that was approved by the Court. A judgment dismissing the action with prejudice was entered by the Court on December 16, 2002.
By the Notice of Pendency of Class Action, a Settlement Fund consisting of $1,500,000 in cash has been established. A hearing will be held to determine whether a proposed settlement of the action as set forth in the Stipulation and Agreement of Settlement dated July 10, 2002, is fair, reasonable and adequate and to consider the proposed Plan of Allocation for the Settlement proceeds the application of Plaintiffs’ Counsel for attorneys’ fees and reimbursement of expenses.
Actually, this middleman scenario is all documented in great detail by cyber security expert Stephen Spoonamore who was interviewed extensively by the folks at http://www.RoveCyberGate.com. Check out the videos and other data there
Wow. So, where were the Democrats in 2004 when we showed all KINDS of voting irregularities? NOW they care about this? I have no respect anymore for the Democratic party. They allowed the 2000 election to be stolen and Bush to be appointed. They allowed massive voter disenfranchisement in 2004 and not a single damn Senator would stand up for all of those people. Ohio, Florida, etc. Where the hell were they then? But this SC race they care about.
No, they do not care about it. Not the vast majority. Clyburn maybe a little. Just watched a CNN piece on this. All yuk-yuk, aint it weird, and this guy aint too bright ha-ha. Just like the WaPo article I mentioned yesterday, NOT ONE WORD about the questionable machines. No mention that the election even used electronic voting.
The Democratic Party will do what their corporate masters order them to do. Sweep it under the rug as best you can. If forced to discuss it, come up with any other scenerio but by no means mention anything negative about the sacred machines.
Burden of proof on Rawls is just one more absurdity piled on top of so many others that make up our electoral proceedures and apparatus.
lol
http://www.free-times.com/index.php?cat=1992209084141467&act=post&pid=11861006100935349
Mark E. Smith said @ 7:
As this was a primary, not the actual election, a Federal Election Contest in Congress would not apply. This is a matter to challenge at the state/party level for the time being.
So now the Democrats are concerned about election fraud… This is laughable…I mean really. 2000 and 2004 were not enough of a wake-up call for something to be done about the way we vote. These weak yellow belly dems make me sick.
Flo (#15) ~
Great link! That piece is chocked-full of some juicy wording:
Thanks~!
The USA has to smarten up or it will be abandoned by the world community as the violence-prone village idiot (as it is already seen around the world). The hypocrisy is stunning. A country whose whole premise as a nation (and its self-granted right to pontificate to other nations about their internal affairs) is its supposed democracy doesn’t even have an accurate and reliable system of counting peoples votes. Global village idiot.
DebbieKat #12- I agree with virtually everything you say except to point out that Senator Barbara Boxer did stand up as the only Senator to join a House challenge to the certification of Ohio’s 2004 Electoral College votes, as indicated here.
Jeannie, yer welcome. I bookmarked this just so I can read some of the other pieces from Hutchins in the future. I love his style.
Mark E. Smith @7, I was going to respond to your post but I see that Brad already did @16 already did.
The difference between this and Busby/Bilbray is that then CA Sec. of State Bruce McPherson had swiftly certified the election to Congress so that Bilbray could be sworn in. That is what deprived CA courts of jurisdiction. Here we have only an alleged winner of a primary; not the winner of a general election.
Brad is absolutely correct about the distorted placement of the burden of proof. Study-after-study has shown that a single, malicious insider/hacker with access to the source codes can determine the outcome of a “virtual” election conducted on the wholly unverifiable DREs.
When absurd results, such as a dropping of thousands of votes, or more votes being counted for a candidate than were cast for all candidates, we should start with a presumption that the “election” was invalid. The burden should be on ES&S to prove its sweatshop manufactured E-junk actually counted any votes let alone all of the votes accurately.
And if they can’t make that proof, SC should be looking to charge ES&S for the cost of the failed election at the same time it moves to hold a special election.
Is it “democracy” if your vote is not counted?