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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."
Were the candidates listed alphabetically by first name? Maybe people just selected the first name on the list. Normally I wouldn't think people would do something as dumb as that, but SC is pretty close to Florida.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
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.
It's possible there was fraud. But the fact that if Dems don't like an outcome, they immediately bring up this kind of bullshit is just fucking ridiculous. Does anybody not KNOW the state of South Carolina at all? It's perfectly conceivable that he could have won.
Let's see, duh, a halfway handsome black guy in a state full of lots of black people and EVERYONE in the state is a goddamn moron (the white morons are the ones that want to fly the Confederate flag, remember?)...
Nah, there's no way he could have won. Must be because of the evil people who did somethign we can't see! If ONLY we knew the truth!
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.
Why would there have been a revolt? All it did in 2000 and 2004 is empower the democrats who eventually took over. And they took over not because they were better, but because they weren't "Bush". This is why they are expecting heavy losses this and the next election, because Bush, the guy they demonized for 8 years isn't around for them not to be.