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The South Carolina Primary and Voting Machine Fraud
cSeattleGameboy writes "South Carolina sure knows how to pick 'em. Alvin Greene is a broke, unemployed guy who is facing a felony obscenity charge. He made no campaign appearances and raised no money, but he is the brand new Democratic Senate nominee from South Carolina. Tom Schaller at FiveThirtyEight.com does a detailed analysis of how a guy like this wins a primary race, and many of the signs point to voting machine fraud. There seem to have been irregularities on all sides. 'Dr. Mebane performed second-digit Benford's law tests on the precinct returns from the Senate race. ... If votes are added or subtracted from a candidate's total, possibly due to error or fraud, Mebane's test will detect a deviation from this distribution. Results... showed that Rawl's Election Day vote totals depart from the expected distribution at 90% confidence. In other words, the observed vote pattern for Rawl could be expected to occur only about 10% of the time by chance. ... An unusual, non-random pattern in the precinct-level results suggests tampering, or at least machine malfunction, perhaps at the highest level. And Mebane is perhaps the leading expert on this very subject. Along with the anomalies between absentee ballot v. election day ballots..., something smells here.' Techdirt.com points out that South Carolina uses ES&S voting machines, which have had strings of problems before; and they have no audit trail."
This is all a bunch af HOOEY to justify tossing out a legit candidate that none of the BIG MONEY wanted. Too bad, so sad, HE WON!
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
You know an election has gone seriously wrong when the total number of votes reported in the Republican primary is not equal to the total voter Republican turnout in the same area.
Was he listed under "A" or "G"? Were the other candidates listed around "Z", "Q" and "U"?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
for the first AI so all this nonsense can stop once and for all.
One day, talking non-ironically of a "Voting machine" will attract the same kind of contempt as talking seriously about a Perpetual Motion machine does.
The only people trying to convince you that they are worthwhile right now are shysters - just as it has been for perpetual motion since before the 1800s.
Both are just as impossible; one because it defies the laws of physics as we know them; the other because it defies human behavior as we know it.
Here's the problem... if this was a "dirty trick" by the Republican side.... why in this much of an already red district? This was a safe seat that's now in jeopardy if this scandal goes much further.
In other words, the observed vote pattern is something you will expect to see a lot when checking various machines and various elections over time.
A 10% chance of a pattern in no way suggests any tampering. Perhaps together with other evidence it is a tiny indicator. It's hard to take any article seriously that doesn't examine the facts properly. Now if the chance was one in a million it might suggest tampering, but one in 10? I'll put it bluntly: Give me a fooking break
The P value of this test is 0.1, pretty much all research I read demands a P value of 0.05 to justify a hypothesis. How many elections are there in the USA every year? By this standard even if all of them were not tampered with and totally legitimate 1/10th of them would be found to have been tampered with. That's a large percentage of false positives for such a serious accusation.
Basically, bullshit, either do better research to get a lower P value or stop drawing such spurious conclusions.
South Carolina voter registration is close to 50% AA according to NPR. Greene is black. Greene had the first position on the ballot. Rawl did not raise money or campaign. Rawl did not do basic opposition research to find out Greene's shortcomings before the election. It sounds like Rawl should have lost because he is a terrible candidate and basically assumed he would just win because he was the "establishment candidate". In case people have not noticed the "establishment candidates" haven't been doing particularly well lately.
depart from the expected distribution at 90% confidence. In other words, the observed vote pattern for Rawl could be expected to occur only about 10% of the time by chance.
Just no. There's 10 percent chance of a type 1 error, assuming the null hypothesis (no cheating) is true.
Ya'll racists can't accept that Mr. Greene, a popular African-American, won the election fair and square so you guys undermine the integrity of our very system that is so great so you can throw out the will of the voters that elected him.
Why don't you guys put on the white robes, toss the bed sheet on the horse and chase this guy out of town you bunch of racists!
hey guys,
Been stuck on Grepolis.net the past few months.
Anyways I feel that daily voting can fix lots of this. I am wondering if an open source software system could be made.
-anon voting while preventing double voters (craigslist email style, only system knows yer identity)
-330 million Americans, 30 million Canadians, 60 million UK residents, all downvoting "RIAAtarded" laws no one wanted in the first place
Hoping "iVote" will take the lead someday.
If voting is so important every 5 years why do we not do it everyday? With secure voting systems the military would use to protect THEIR systems (heard they run varities of Linux b/c Windows is too insecure)
My big question is can this even be done? You guys are the smart ones on here. I await the idea of online 24/7 voting on some website to be cut up and reverse engeneered for the betterment of man. :P
I just thought the ideals of Linux could port over to our corrupt government, easily bought. They should ref the game, not give home team advantage....
Anyways I felt enough about this issue to buy up:
http://www.opensourceg.com
Just a place to rant and save ideas about the possibility of voting each day like e-mail of facebook.
Thanks for reading. :)
FreeSCV
Yes, its an indication there might be tampering, but since there is NO WAY TO PROVE IT because there is NO AUDIT TRAIL, ASSUME IT INDICATES TAMPERING, because when you can't prove fraud, because a machine which is purposefully designed to make tampering easy, PURPOSEFULLY DESIGNED FOR EASY TAMPERING, you must assume tampering.
I don't know, to know all the crap the fellow in office is going to jail for ahead of time quite refreshing really. Saves a lot of drama later.
hey guys, Been stuck on Grepolis.net the past few months. Anyways I feel that daily voting can fix lots of this. I am wondering if an open source software system could be made. -anon voting while preventing double voters (craigslist email style, only system knows yer identity) -330 million Americans, 30 million Canadians, 60 million UK residents, all downvoting "RIAAtarded" laws no one wanted in the first place Hoping "iVote" will take the lead someday. If voting is so important every 5 years why do we not do it everyday? With secure voting systems the military would use to protect THEIR systems (heard they run varities of Linux b/c Windows is too insecure) My big question is can this even be done? You guys are the smart ones on here. I await the idea of online 24/7 voting on some website to be cut up and reverse engeneered for the betterment of man. :P
I just thought the ideals of Linux could port over to our corrupt government, easily bought. They should ref the game, not give home team advantage....
Anyways I felt enough about this issue to buy up:
http://www.opensourceg.com/
Just a place to rant and save ideas about the possibility of voting each day like e-mail of facebook.
Thanks for reading. :)
FreeSCV
http://www.opensourceg.com - A Man Can Dream
I do have a problem when listening to the Democrats and the Republicans argue over who's to blame for this election result and why. And that problem is that both parties are so full of shit and cannot be believed. So the challenge now is to figure out which party is lying about this story the least.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Of cause, if the other side won, it's still only 90% chance. I don't think 9 times the chance is sufficient to say that no tampering was involved.
I saw an interview with the guy. There are no words. If he won fair and square, then I weep for my children.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Party politics aside - I don't really know what anyone from any govt. could have done about this. Once the thing blows all you can do is make sure the people responsible are doing all they can do fix it, and are adequately punished. After all they know best how to fix the mess, and have plenty of reason do to so (i.e. the quicker they fix it the less they pay over all).
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
It's worth noting that in some precincts, Mr. Greene received more votes than were cast. As in, he got 115% of the votes. In others, he won the election day votes by 20 points but lost the absentee votes by 60. There are major, major discrepancies in vote tallies in this election. You can quibble about confidence intervals and statistics all you want, but it won't change the fact that *something* went wrong here. While it's probably not malicious, it absolutely should be investigated.
My other sig is clever.
The basis of this article seems to be that it's impossible for an unknown such as Alvin Greene to get voted in.
Here's the thing. Alvin Greene isn't unknown! I'm not an American and i know who he is. He posts on a ton of internet forums. He is well known on Digg, reddit etc.
There have been threads about him with 1000+ Diggs.
http://digg.com/search?s=Alvin+Greene
If you consider any publicity to be good publicity Alvin Greene is the most well known politician after Obama. It seems to me this is a case of a politician discovering an entirely new way to promote themselves- Log into social media sites and start posting.
All of the threads that have on the social news sites you point out have been created since he won the nomination. He did not post or promote himself on any of the popular social media sites.
Would you say to meteorologist that 9 out of 10 of hurricanes like this one were destructive, "That's meaningless unless it's 19 out of 20"?
The threshold for statistical significance is an arbitrary convention, not some ironclad law that lets you ignore evidence. As a guideline it is more appropriate in some circumstances than in others. Something does not stop being evidence simply because it does not reach that threshold. I read scholarly papers all the time that say "while X does not achieve the threshold of significance, it is suggestive and worthy of more research." When there is other evidence to support it, such a result can be valuable. And there is such evidence: this calculation was done precisely because the election looks fishy.
You have it exactly wrong when you say "that's a large percentage of false positives for such a serious accusation." The election process is not innocent until proven guilty. We apply the presumption of innocence to human beings. An election is treated in the opposite way. It is not enough for it to be fair: it must be seen to be fair. It must be must be demonstrably legitimate. We do not let suspicious elections slide simply because the accusation is "serious." On the contrary, that is why we investigate them. This needs to be investigated precisely because of its seriousness.
South Carolina uses an open primary system where any registered voter can vote in the Democratic primary, not just registered Democratic Party members.
Is it possible that thousands of Republicans decided to vote for Alvin Greene not because they want him to be their next Senator, but because he is such a hopeless candidate that he will be crushed by the Republican nominee?
On the face of it, this open primary system seems open to abuse. If you vote for candidate A in the primary, and he wins the primary to move onto the general election ballot, shouldn't your vote be "locked in" to support him in the general election?
Fraud would be if the candidate or someone on their behalf tampered with the results or the machines to get them elected. If the voting machines are defective and produce a illegitimate outcome then it's something else. Not to mention beating 1 in 10 odds isn't that suspicious.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
It's funny that everyone is up in arms about a nobody winning this race. If there's fraud, may it be found and dealt with (not fabricated). But couple this with Bob Ethridge's behavior http://voices.washingtonpost.com/reliable-source/2010/06/rs-_etheridge.html and the arrogance of the professional politician is revealed, it would seem. I recall some local podcasters being called to a "meeting" to discuss new media with some journalists from our local newspaper (a major city newspaper, mind you). Essentially they were sat down and told who the real journalists were. Arrogance generally reveals more stupidity than mastery.
There were threads about him with 1000+ Diggs *** AFTER *** the election, due to an interview with Keith Olberman (AFTER the election) where he appears to be several bricks short of a load. What does his becoming known after the election have to do with Alvin Green being unknown prior to voting in SC? Illogical argument.
Nothing to see here, this seems just like any of the projects that seem to go ahead at my work, so move along, nothing to see. No rubber-necking please.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
End-to-end auditable voting systems, FIFY.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
--Halons razor
So not really any different from the typical politician.
Apart from being broke, but I'm sure that'll fix itself soon enough.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Well, I'm not sure why people say I'm not qualified to be in office, 'cause according to my own Wikipidea article I have an advanced degree in Political Science (more than most political yahoos have), and I served as an intelligence specialist and a unit supply specialist in the U.S. Army and has served in the Air Force and Army national guards. I have received the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, the Air Force Good Conduct Medal, the Korea Defense Service Medal, and the National Defense Service Medal.
As for the felony obscenity charge; I was charged for showing porn to an 18 year old girl and asking her if she wanted to do it with me. I always thought the legal age of consent in South Carolina was 12, so I thought there was plenty of leeway (she looked well over 14 to me).
I know I'm poor, black, unemployed, uncultured, and I made a sexual advance towards a white teenage girl who was 18, which is why my own (Democratic) party wants me disqualified and aborted as if I never existed. I know I don't fit in, but the white and the black trash of South Carolina democratically voted me into office, and I believe that votes should count, no-matter how uneducated and unqualified the voting public is at making decisions.
I guess people are jealous because I'm the first popularly elected African-American Senator from the South. It don't matter to me, cause I'm moving out of the mountains and taking my kin along. You know what they say:
Fish don't fry in the kitchen;
Beans don't burn on the grill.
Took a whole lotta tryin',
Just to get up that hill.
Now we're up in the big leagues,
Gettin' our turn at bat.
As long as we live, it's you and me baby,
There ain't nothin wrong with that.
Well we're movin on up...
We finally got a piece of the pie!!
Signed,
Al
Hey Mr Foreigner, let us free you from evil by invading your country and giving you democracy! Oh yes, it's great - look how well it works in our world! Oh, hang on...
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
so what would they have to gain by doing this?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Stop the snow job. He's a military intelligence vet and a man with a Poly Sci degree. So what if he's unemployed after he leaves the service? It's tough out there. The ABC interview was a butchering.
Anyone seen my low uid? last seen 10 years ago while panning the #@$# out of Taco's 'web based discussion system'
And if the government did get more involved, GP would be screaming about "commyanizzum!".
Depends. I could walk around and see how much mess they made.
But in the voting situation you're trying to make inferences from a hidden process; you didn't actually catch anyone stuffing ballot boxes.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Any news that shows the public at large how inherently broken today's evoting system are are good news. Especially so when proof can not be denied.
Why inherently, you ask? Because as long as electronic votes are not _at least_ as heavily guarded on a multitude of levels as electronic money, things can not change. Cost/benefit for attackers to simply too good.
The South Carolina vote is just a test run for the November election. The goal is to re-elect the left-wing Congress and the only guaranteed way of doing that is to cheat. But it looks like Obama's team needs to tweak its method of cheating.
Fata viam invenient.
I'd still vote for him over Bush.
Of course not. The ironclad law that lets us ignore evidence is "correlation is not causation".
Look, SC has been voting crooks into office for generations. So finally they can elect a man who is openly flawed, i.e., human. He'll probably be better (and more honest) than most of his predecessors.
Maybe the voters weren't voting for Greene, but were really not voting for Vic Rawl. Is it impossible to not want ANYBODY that's new when ALL off the current politcos are just jacking up our country? Hell at this point I'd vote for anybody that was NOT a Dem or Rep.
http://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/HaireoftheDog/archives/2010/06/12/vic-rawl-campaign-relied-on-robocalls-emails-to-win
According to his own campaign people:
"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."
If two people were running, and one of them had been robocalling and spamming, maybe this just pissed people off enough to vote for the name they did not recognise?
WTF. that's the weirdest part of this whole thing.
We will test all campaigns. This is only a test.
This is an outlier.
This will not happen again.
This is not the Dem you are looking for.
Nothing to see here.
Move along.
It makes sense back in 1700s that we would want someone to speak on our behalf. It took weeks for news to arrive by mail to some parts. Now we have the telegraph. The phone. Radio. TV. Internet.
Why is our only voice in our government to give that voice away to people we don't trust let alone even like? Or sometimes to those we don't even know...
*DrugCheese rants*
So he's part of the socialist party, big deal. Maybe it was a mistake or maybe the voters just got fed up with the socialist and neocon party's big candidates and chose a small time socialist instead. Who knows? We never will, and these damn lies called statistics won't give us an answer, it's just lying with numbers, baffling with BS. As for the description of this fellow a " broke, unemployed guy who is facing a felony obscenity charge" ... Well, a lot of people are unemployed in with the way the economy is these days. It's not uncommon. Generally being unemployed leads to being broke, what with the lack of income and such. Being broke may lead to obscenity in public, such as "Fuck I wish I could afford a cold glass of iced tea right now, it's hot out" or the obscenity that gets you a permanant record as a sex offender, taking a leak in public such as "Damn I drank too much iced tea, I'll step off this path here and take a leak behind these shrubberies before I piss myself". In hte USSA everything is a felony or chargeable offense, so being a felon doesn't necessarily mean anything.
Bottom line is technology has a time and place, and it's not in voting machines.
His name was the first one on the ballot. Many people just pick the top one. No scandal, human nature, get over it.
How can you not see the obvious advantage the Republicans gain from having such an unfit candidate to run against? Practically anyone with a pulse could beat this idiot in a fair election.
A 10% chance of a pattern in no way suggests any tampering
It's not a "10% of a chance". It says that if the election had been fair, then this test should have been different 90% of the time.
In different words, the result says "there is at least a 90% chance that the results have been manipulated; other tests may increase this estimate further".
An inexperienced and uninformed-of-the-issues candidate has entered the national political scene (and I'm not talking about Sarah Palin).
So what?
All he has to do is kiss babies, take money from lobbiests, and vote the way his party leaders tell him to, just like 515 other legislators.
--Joe
How do you suppose we investigate suspicious elections?
On any given election day, imagine how many different elections are going on. There are over 10,000 cities in the US. In a presidential election, the ballot I see tends to have at least ten people to vote for, a mix of local, state, and federal.
Every election cycle, even if a given result could only happen 1 out of a hundred times by chance, it's almost certain to happen multiple times each election.
We're always going to have election results that are unlikely.
So what do we do about it? Yes, I will support investigations in events like these, but at the same time, I think we need to start before the election, with the machines themselves.
even if a given result could only happen 1 out of a hundred times by chance
How about if it could only happen zero out of a hundred times by chance? For example, another poster has claimed that more votes were counted for Greene in some districts than were cast by a 15% margin.
The ballot entries were listed in alphabetical order. Green comes before Rawls. Both were relatively unknown quantities. People are stupid.
I think, as I heard someone on NPR say this morning, people just choose the first guy on the list.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
It is truely fascinating to me that no one (apparently) asked any questions during the primary race, there was very little to no interest in him UNTIL he won the primary, but not just any primary, but a democratic primary at that!
A few questions:
a) Is South Carolina an "open" or "closed" primary? Meaning, can registered Republicans vote in the Democratic primary?
b) Who ran against him? Why didn't they question his candidacy at the time?
c) Why, with a "statistical probability" of about one in ten is this outcome considered so improbable? If I'm asked to pick a number between one and ten and I guess it correctly, is it really proof of a conspiracy?
d) How did he get to self-affiliate with the Democratic party? Is there no process to determine if people who claim to be Democratic candidates are truely Democratic candidates? (You know, like call the party headquarters, request documentation from the candidate, etc.?)
Just a few fun points to make:
1) This candidate can not be accused of not following through on his campaign promises - since he made none.
2) All his "baggage" (showing an inapropriate image to a female college student?) is now known.
3) If this candidate were a Republican, don't you think the Democrats would have researched the snot out of this fellow? (Why hold their own to a lesser standard?)
4) He most likely was not supported by any local "Tea Party" coalition. (Despite dillusional assertions to the contrary.)
5) Any chance the losing democratic candidates will register as Independent candidates and run in the general election, dilluting the democratic ticket by splitting the vote and all but assuring the Republican on the ticket re-election?
Ken
One also needs to keep in mind that these tests only give lower bounds on the effect. That is, for any given significance level, there are tons of tests that give lower significance (which you can generally disregard), but there also may be tests that give higher significance (which you can't use until you have identified them, obviously).
Also, his name is Al Greene. It's neutral. It's comfortable. That means a lot, especially when it's the first name on the ballot. I can't cite because I'm too lazy, but I read a study that suggested that when you have a list of people on a ballot that nobody knows, they will pick the name that looks the best to them. Even more so when the other name on the ballot has a negative association, like Vic Rawl.
Back in 1990, Rod Shealy used this exact same tactic in a Lt. Governor race in SC. He recruited a homeless black guy with a criminal conviction in an attempt to take out the Democratic frontrunner, so his sister (a Republican) could win. It was a crass attempt to play on the racial prejudices of SC (both for blacks in the Democratic Party and against blacks among the general populace) to get his sister elected. He almost succeeded to. And he is still working in SC Republican politics (most recently in the Bauer gubernatorial campaign).
All of you who are saying this is a preposterous idea have obviously never been involved in SC politics. This isn't even a particularly nasty tactic by SC standards.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Maybe there were a lot of Hispanics in those precincts and they were simply doing what a federal judge allowed Hispanics in Port Chester, NY to do. That is, they get to cast multiple votes...six times each..., just because they're Hispanic. That's right, not "One man, one vote", but rather "Un hombre, seis votos".
Mods: Before you mod me, you must read the Yahoo News article first. This is truly a major-league WTF moment in this nation's history.
In disputed elections, it if found time and again that voters have cast ambiguous ballots, with the mark or marks in the wrong place, or too many marks, or too few. Especially with the relatively complex ballots commonly used in the USA, electronic verification of the voter's choices is a good thing. There is no reason to allow a voter to cast a self-defeating ballot, (The voter should still be able to abstain from one or more races, but the system should verify that this is really what he or she wants to do.)
An electronic system that verifies the voter's choices and then prints them on paper in a format that's easily readable by both humans and computers should not be difficult to implement, and will bring benefits to the voters and to the election authorities.
The Democrats were idiotic enough to buy a pig in a poke.
Now they are stuck with it.
Its not after all as if it were New Jersey where they could do whatever they pleased when their candidate
(Toricelli) was found to have serious problems after the primaries.
I actually did vote for this guy.
He is exactly the opposite of any politician out there. I honestly probably trust him more.
Whichever I vote for, the odds are poor that my views will be represented exactly how I want.
Hopefully this scares the shit out of both parties, as if this will actually happen, as I fully expect it won't.
So, what the fuck?
So, you're saying that Democrats in SC are so racists that their whole party platform can be brought down by having someone running that is ostensibly on the same side but of a different heritage?
Damn. Just, damn.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
For still having the brains to use paper & pencils.
Now if we can get son of C-61 (Canadian DMCA) buried and C-389 (Gender identity & gender expression) passed, it'd be gold star time for us!
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Negroes voted as often as they could. Just like during American Idol against Clay Aiken, while being gay, was a better singer across the board.
Niggers will always cheat and they always get caught being the shits they are. That is why black on black crime is so rampant, niggers recognize each other as the lying criminals they are. QED. Even Oprah fails to learn from history, as do most Slashdotter liberal assholes do. Such is life.
And you people bitch about Gay Niggers Form Outer Space, how contrary! Look in the mirror and see
how shitty you are. Give me bad karma, it will not change who YOU are!!!
The only reason a voting machine would be designed with no audit trail would be to encourage / allow corruption and/or tampering. Until open source voting machine with audit trails are used and subject to third party audits you may as well just stay home.
I'd like to take a moment to quote the late George Carlin -
There's a reason for this, there's a reason education sucks, and it's the same reason it will never ever ever be fixed. It's never going to get any better. Don't look for it. Be happy with what you've got... because the owners of this country don’t want that. I'm talking about the real owners now... the real owners. The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin’ years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your fuckin' retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later 'cause they own this fuckin' place. It’s a big club and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted, folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good, honest, hard-working people: white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good, honest, hard-working people continue — these are people of modest means — continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you at all! At all! At all! And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes every day, because the owners of this country know the truth. It’s called the American Dream, 'cause you have to be asleep to believe it.
Let us start with the observation that vote fraud is as american as apple pie. Consider jfk vs nixon. The vote fraud in Texas and Chicag gave the race to jfk. Nixon knew this AND had court room style proof.
My observation is that these statistical type arguments do not do well in a court room. So stat expert could this have happened by chance?
The really relevant thing at this point is that a lot of incumbents simply cannot get elected, on one hand, and on the others, people get elected that no can believe could win, and even after the fact, there is no explanation possible, at least publically. I think of Rogers in texas and most recenty Lincoln in I think arkansas.
Rogers was an unknown, but real clear about impeaching obama and wn the dem CD nminatin in a three way race. Might have got twice the votes of the dem hack. Lincoln is an incumbent dem, but has not been properly obedient to Obama and serious in closing down the speculators. So big money came in against her. Soros, moveon. So she push her attacks on wall street and did fine. But among the important people she had already been retired.
Two things do seem to be of interest. Bill Clinton is popping up to defend some incumbents, as Lincoln. And the mass strike process, which is starting to be called "the french revolution effect". If you are going to use the last phrase, you should ask what Lafeyette did wrong back home.
of Mr. Greene's strategy was that the worse a candidate he seemed to be, the more cross-over votes he got. For all I know, it could be the only realistic way to get on a Dem ballot in SC.
It seems his candidacy is exceptional in many regards; so a 1 in 10 chance that there was a ballot error / fraud seems to me to be the least of it.
Also it seems redundant to manufacture scandal when there is so much naturally occurring scandal in SC politics anyway.
Nullius in verba
s/didn't catch/can't catch/
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
For those who do not read, Alvin Greene has a degree in political science. I don't see how it makes sense to act like he is a know-nothing, drooling idiot.
There may have been major fraud in the Republican primary, and since it involved voting machine tampering, they added-on some fraud in the Democratic primary. The hint for this is that in some counties there were more votes than voters in the Republican primary. This suggests voting machine tampering of the kind Harry Hursti demonstrated some years ago. He did it on a Diebold optical scan machine, but ES&S could have a similar opening to tampering.
What Hursti did was to add votes to one candidate at the start of voting and subtract votes from the other. Say, one candidate starts with +20 votes on a machine and the other starts with -20 votes. Then the number of votes and voters are equal, but the second candidate has to get 20 votes to get to zero. Hursti programmed the machine to falsify the beginning-of-day zero report, so the initial settings didn't show up then.
Now, what happens if the second candidate doesn't get the 20 votes needed to get to zero? No candidate can legitimately end an election with negative votes, so the perpetrator has to do something about it. The easiest thing to do is just flip the sign on the report. Then the number of votes recorded on the machine will be more than the number of voters who used the machine. That's what may have happened in the Republican primary and may account for the discrepancies in those counties.
My guess is that with the machines being tampered with in the Republican primary and the programming already in place, they just went ahead and tampered with the Democratic primary as well. Perhaps just as mischief.
Wouldn't it be funny if Greene got up on the campaign trail and told everybody that he's a horrible person, did no campaigning and shouldn't have been elected and this is proof of voter fraud and dirty tricks by the Republicans and therefore you should vote against the Republicans to punish them. He could then spend the whole campaign using every personal attack against him as another reason to vote for him.
With all this talk about electronic voting machine fraud, I can only think of one thing: Why not do it the easy way till confidence can be built and bugs ironed out?
1. Do an electronic tally on the machine, stored on a simple-to-remove memory card (beneath a lock, of course) on the machine itself.
2. Also send this count via network to a central data server.
3. Print out a small piece of paper with a short list of votes cast, and a 2D or 3D barcode representing the vote.
You now have 3 checks and balances against every vote. If there's question if the central data server has wrong info, go to the memory cards and reload the database. If there's question if that's wrong, scan in the barcodes. If there's question of the barcodes, do a hand count from the list shown above it.
It's because he is a bought and paid for Chicago democratic mafia gang politician, and everything about his administration is corrupt and incompetent. The only "change" we got going from the barely a primate last idiot and this one is...nothing at all, not a single thing. He's broken every promise he made during the campaign. Anyone who voted for him got took to the cleaners, and there were certainly enough clues out there to see this is what was going to happen. All the dude does is play golf and party and read off a teleprompter. He's an actor, that's it, a puppet. Powerful forces behind the scenes, the same exact global multinationals that always do this, are pulling his strings. He has gone out of his way to obfuscate all the details of his past, because he is a big flat nothing, that is what he is hiding, he got groomed for the position years ago and appointed to it by carefully controlled media hype. WTF man, is there something about propaganda and brainwashing the useful idiots you just don't grok? The globalists just go back and forth and run their groomed candidates so we can have a "change" back and forth, R gang to D gang and back again, lather rinse repeat going way back. They keep their useful idiots pointing fingers at each other, instead of looking behind the curtain to where the real power and influence is, and the big media is the number one way they do this, by pushing crafted propaganda, overlapping "big lies" that are repeated over and over again. And if anyone dares to look behind the curtain, oh noes, they are a "
conspiracy theorist". Bull shit. Most people just don't have the nads to admit they got conned, to stop and back up and take a fresh look at what they might have believed previously, so they stick with their particular flavor of political cult brainwashing instead, because it is easier, and most humans are as lazy as they can get away with, physically and intellectually.
I am a social liberal, an economic conservative, more or less a middle of the roader who would actually like a real Constitutionally limited Federal powers styled government, and I bet I have seen more presidents than even you.
This is a disaster administration, following another disaster administration. Aren't we lucky that so many people *waste their vote* by staying faked out by this propaganda and keep yanking that one gang is so much better than the other criminal gang lever. Glad I didn't vote for him, and no, I didn't vote for McCain either, just another bought and paid for puppet.
Well, no, it didn't work. Read the post.
Republicans have a theory that black people vote for black Democrats over white Democrats, no matter how incompetent they are, or how much they are 'real' Democrats. Ergo, they think if they run incompetent black people as Democrats, they will split the vote. Or at the very least, have some black people, disgusted at the primary outcome, not vote in the general election.
They also think the same thing about women. (Re: Sarah Palin and the whole PUMA thing they invented and pushed in the media)
This doesn't really work that well. It does work a little, though, and it just costs a filing fee.
And it lets the Republicans have better stats. Sure, they don't elect black guys in their primaries much, but, statistically, neither do the Democrats. (Because half of them are Republican plants.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
No, that's not how it works. You can't equate the probabilities of system failure (including failure to prevent tampering) on both sides of the outcome, because the a priori evidence for each outcome is different.
Or if you prefer frequentist language, a 10% false positive tampering rate when candidate A wins doesn't translate to a 10% false positive tampering rate when candidate B wins, because the two rates are calculated on disjoint outcome sets.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It doesn't matter at all? What if our government really is just puppets of the corporations? What if there really is no true difference between a democrat and a republican? There's nothing we can do about it except post on the internet how it isn't fair or right and how they are trashing our constitution against the will of the people. We could theoretically organize somet- "oh shiny!"- now back to American Idol.
so this MUST be fraud.
I see what you did there ...
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
No. If people of Race B almost always vote for Race B regardless of merit, then Race B candidates will have an edge in smaller elections like primaries (for a large enough population of Race B and sufficiently unknown contests). However, in a general election where candidates are scrutinized more closely, if this Race B candidate is a joke, then even other Race B voters will abandon them. In this case, I would say it is taking advantage of Race B racism. People ought to take their vote seriously, vote on merits, or stay the fuck home.
The regulations and inspections on that rig happened on the GOP's watch.
Heck, Diebold even did this as a method of programming - you ask for election results it'd pull from a different(duplicate) data set than if you pulled for a specific district or region.
There are so many reasons that I want votes to be on human readable paper ballots for recount purposes. Use the machine to help make the vote if you must, but the paper is the final authority.
Machine breaks? Unload the ballots and hand out #2 pencils.
I don't read AC A human right
People in the USA aren't required to vote at all, and primary elections are considered far less important than the main election. Turnouts tend to be low, around 20% (See http://www.southcarolinaradionetwork.com/2010/06/08/primary-turnout-usually-small/). Thus the people who actually bothered to vote are those who have an unusually strong interest in the outcome of the vote. They're not so likely to "just pick the top one".
Fixed in short order -- like the Diebold machines have been?
I'm not arguing that B was not colossally stupid, but there's no guarantee the machines will get fixed, even if there's a video tutorial on vote fraud put out by the very ES&S technicians themselves showing the SC voting machines getting tweaked in time for Alvin Greene.
Maybe I'm just too cynical. I actually hope so.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
anything.
The Governor in SC is nothing more than a figurehead position. It's setup in this state that the state senate has complete control of the state and the lieutenant governor can actually stop the governor from doing...a lot. Doesn't really matter who wins, it's a figurehead seat.
If you want to get something changed in SC, you have to go through the people with weight in the state senate. The status quo remains. Our last governor publicly said that it was setup that way out of fears of a possible black governor after the civil war.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
I think what he's saying is that the swing vote will go for the white "upstading citizen" when presented an option of him (on the rebpulican ticket) versus the a homeless black guy with a criminal record (who happens to be the democratic candidate).
Gosh, I wonder why the Republican tactic of literally painting democrats as corrupt, welfare-abusing criminals plays so well in some parts of the country, when it seems like a ridiculous joke in other parts? Maybe because Republicans put homeless black criminals up to run as democrats in certain parts of the country.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Seems like we only hear about election fraud when the Democrat National Committee gets a result they don't like.
But in this current political climate, what's so hard to believe about an unknown outsider at the top of the ballot winning?
The only ones who can't believe it are the ones heavily invested in forcing the outcome to what we're led to believe is the "predictable" outcome.
Is this another one of those times where voting irregularity in districts with elected democratics running the polling places are blamed on republicans? Can someone explain to me in oldspeak how the republicans are so easily able to dupe these democratic politicians that run the elections in democratic areas so as to allow vote fraud?
just months before is trial he had no money. He had to sign an avidaviant saying so in order to get a public defender.
it costs 10K to get on the ballot.
Where did he get the money?
At this point it looks like he was backed by an unknown republican support to cause confusion. It's also not a coincidence they found someone whose name came before the democrat on the ballot
This has happened before, and the state is RIFE with political shenanigan.
.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yeah, this makes perfect sense. Let's commit massive voting fraud to nominate a candidate who has no chance of winning anyway.
Then what? Claim that the Republican win in November is just another instance of the voting machines getting it wrong?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It seems quite undemocratic that the fee is so high that you'd *have* to have external support just to throw your name into a hat.
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
Listening to the radio yesterday (here in SC) I heard a black man state that in his church, two of the other Democrat candidates for state wide office, whose last names both start with A, were passing out flyers instructing people to vote for the first name on the ballot. He also said that he knew of other black churches where the same thing happened.
Green came before Rawl, simple as that.
Alvin Green won, he should be allowed to run. (Not that he will beat Demint anyway).
Peace
Parent poster points out some interesting things about the GOP and racism. The irony of the Deep South being both 'Republican' and racist, is that they were the 'solid South', voting staunchly Democrat, up until Lyndon Johnson signed the Equal Rights Amendment. Why did the deep South vote Democrat for so long? Abraham Lincoln was a Republican.
The Deep South voting bloc cares little about niceties like the Constitution if it gets in the way of them having power. They are a cohesive and crafty bunch of politicians. They are more akin to fascists than anything else.
Best regards.
It however comes out to a 90% chance for all other possibilities other than the current case, in which "if the other side won" is a subset of.
Absolutely! I live in SC and can vouch for this. It isn't news down here to either party.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
The idiot or apathetic Democratic voters nominated this unelectable guy, and now they want a re-do so they can put in an establishment candidate who has a chance in hell of winning.
He won , So there... people recognized his mane just as much as the other guy(whatever his name was) at this point in the game most of the people I talked to that voted in this race was just pick the first democrat on the list.... And guess who that was ???
FragHARD or don't frag at all
No, not the Three Laws:
"Those with a name early in the alphabet succeed more often than those with names at the end of the alphabet."
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
Harry Reid has done a lot worse in Nevada. :/
Gosh, I wonder why the Republican tactic of literally painting democrats as corrupt, welfare-abusing criminals plays so well in some parts of the country, when it seems like a ridiculous joke in other parts? Maybe because Republicans put homeless black criminals up to run as democrats in certain parts of the country.
...and...go ahead, finish the statement... ...and then the Democrats vote for the homeless black criminal, just because he's black. Thus, their racism brings down the whole platform.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Don't you rather mean, because he's the democratic candidate? That's the only reason dyed in the wool democrats vote for black candidates. You don't see democrats voting for black republican candidates because they're black, do you?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
We're talking about a Democratic PRIMARY, ie, the Dems are voting to see which of their own will run in the election. In this case, they have elected to have someone run that is ridiculously unqualified. The candidate's win in the primary may be due to the fact that his name was listed first on the ballot. That's definitely a possibility.
However, the original post of this thread suggested that the Dems would vote for a black candidate above a white candidate regardless of qualifications. Furthermore, that Republicans would actually plant an unqualified black candidate in order to have an unqualified candidate promoted to the real election. If this is the case, it would indicate an overriding racism on the part of Democrats. Racism so strong that it is possible to manipulate it in oder to undermine the Democratic platform.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba