This is the case that Brad talked about from South Carolina. It is so preposterous that it must have been done as a mean-spirited joke just to demonstrate how blatant ‘they’ could be.
I can easily imagine a pair of elderly southern party bosses exchanging a dollar as one exclaims to the other, “You were right Mortimer, we could secure the party nomination for a complete nobody and get away with it!”
The Alvin Greene Case – South Carolina 2010So the summary here is that an unemployed, poorly funded, criminally indicted man with no campaign website and no campaign staff managed to somehow defeat a well-liked, well-respected, well-funded and well-staffed adversary.SHOCKING UPSET
An unknown deadbeat, Alvin Greene, defeated a successful public servant, Vic Rawl, by an enormous margin of 18 percent in the 2010 South Carolina Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate.
UNQUALIFIED PATSY
Alvin Greene was facing obscenity charges for showing pornography to a woman in a college computer lab. He had recently been kicked out of the military. He was unemployed.
Despite his lack of qualifications and income he spent $10,000 filing to run for senator. When Greene asked for a public defender in the obscenity case, many questioned how he had acquired the cash [to file for the election]. There was speculation that he was a Republican plant.
Greene was unaffiliated with local Democrats. His campaign was nonexistent—no website, no yard sign, no public appearances, no fundraising, no advertisements.
CAREER PUBLIC SERVANT
Yet the voting machines showed Greene defeating former judge and four-term state legislator Vic Rawl by 30,000 votes.
Rawl was on the Charleston County Council. He was a respected community leader. He ran an active campaign with hundreds of volunteers. How could he have lost?
STATISTICAL EVIDENCE OF RIGGING
Hand-counted paper absentee ballots showed opposite results compared to electronic voting. Rawl won many of those votes—often by a large margin, a complete flip of what Greene had won on the voting machines.
According to Rawl's campaign manager Walter Ludwig, half of South Carolina's counties had a disparity between absentee and election day votes greater than 10 points. Spartanburg County was rife with anomalies: precincts where Greene received more votes than were actually cast, and precincts where votes appeared to be missing. Rarely did the vote totals match.
Ludwig also reported that a similar discrepancy between absentee and electronic votes "didn't happen in any other races on the ballot."
NO ACCOUNTABILITY
South Carolina is particularly vulnerable to fraudulent results because the entire state uses touchscreen voting machines made by Election Systems & Software. The iVotronic leaves no paper trail, making it impossible to verify elections for accuracy.
A security analysis by the University of Pennsylvania found “numerous exploitable vulnerabilities in nearly every component of the ES&S system.” These vulnerabilities open the voting machines to attacks that could “alter or forge precinct results, install corrupt firmware, and erase audit records.”
STRATEGIC RIGGING
Manipulating a low-attention primary to produce a weak opponent is a subtle way to rig a general election. Was Alvin Greene a legitimate candidate or an unqualified patsy set up for an untraceable electronic rig?
Greene ran in a subsequent election for the state legislature and won a mere 37 votes.
WHO BENEFITED
Jim DeMint and his right-wing backers were the ultimate beneficiaries of Alvin Greene’s implausible victory in the Democratic Senate primary.
DeMint sailed to victory with a massive margin over Greene, allowing his radical views to influence the U.S. Senate—no right to abortion in cases of rape, no gay civil rights, erosion of public health care, and weakening of Social Security.
DeMint later left the Senate to head an ultraconservative group that pushes oppressive voter ID regulations.
By 18 points!!
But only in the electronic machine results…the hand-counted paper ballots showed the exact opposite result.
Then this derelict loner was easily trounced in the general election by the Tea Party candidate Jim DeMint…so the summary here is not that Alvin Greene pulled off this stunning feat of election rigging, he was an obvious patsy in the charade.
The real mystery is how such obvious cases go utterly unchallenged. Where’s the accountability?
I also offer such cases as definitive proof against those who make the argument that “large conspiracies cannot exist because somebody would talk.”
That’s just not true. Such conspiracies happen all the time and the US election rigging is about as obvious an area as one could hope to study. Means, motive, opportunity…and reams and reams of statistical evidence that, to me, is ironclad.
Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action.
Note that the machines in use in South carolina were made by ES&S, the same company that Chuck Hagel 'left' prior to winning his own massive 18 point 'upset' in Oklahoma.
What is it about 18 to these guys? Just a vote rigging bug or is that some sort of wink from the bad guys to those in the know?