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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."
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.
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.
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.
Because if the scandal issue would have worked, there would have been a revolt in 2000 and 2004.
Learn to love Alaska
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.
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.
That may seems so only on the first glance. In reality, the Republican candidate had a 19 point lead in the polls over the Democrat leading candidate (the guy who lost to Alvin Green): http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2010/senate/sc/south_carolina_senate_demint_vs_rawl-1579.html This is in a seat that has been comfortably Republican since the 70s. The Republicans had absolutely nothing to fear and no reason to risk a scandal. On top of that, the Republican primary was very heavily contested and it seems unlikely that many Republicans would choose to vote in a Democrat primary instead (you can't vote in both of course). I have a feeling this is something personal, somebody wanted to embarrass Rawl for whatever reason.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
>>If this shows anything, though, it's the need for a non-electronic audit trail. I've often had people find it odd, given that I'm a programmer, that I'm so against purely electronic voting.
Indeed. In fact, it has been demonstrated to be so easy to own some of the electronic voting machines (many years back) that the fact that people are still using these atroicities is a disgrace. My county (San Diego County) scrapped the electronic voting machines, or at least it looks that way. They weren't in existence at the local Registrar of Voters, but they were four years ago... and those even those would just print a paper ballot that you would be asked to visually confirm.
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'
Most? By what measure? Of the 80-something incumbents running in primaries last week, 2 didn't win. One made it to a run-off and one had a list of pending criminal charges as long as my arm.
Just because the news channels have a favorite narrative, it doesn't mean it's real.
Er, Rawl raised some money. Not a lot (for an election)... only about $200,000.
Greene has apparently raised $0. And had no advertisements. Rawl at least had some name recognition.
I'm not saying Rawl should have had a completely guaranteed win. But something in this smells wrong.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
but there is nothing else suspicious. this just sounds like bullshit to me.
Nothing else suspicious?! The "winner" of the primary is unemployed, is facing a felony charge, and made no campaign appearances! Does any of that sound suspicious?
In a poll taken approximately a week before the election, only 4% of the potential voters recognized the name of the "loser". So, no, none of that sounds suspicious.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Lamest troll ever.
Only in the Republican universe did 'Republicans' oppose segregation and 'Democrats' support it.
What actually happened, as anyone with an IQ over 80 knows, is that the South supported segregation, regardless of party, and North supported civil rights, regardless of party.
And this split was so large it ended up breaking both parties in half, and the Republicans all ended up in with the segregationists afterward. You know that 'George Wallace', that you point out was a Democrat? Well, no. After that little stunt, he had to run as a independent for president in 1968 (In which he came in at 13% of the vote, winning the south), and had to disavow his previous segregation stand in 1972 to run as a Democrat.
And that, of course, isn't even why people think the Republican are racist. It didn't end there. The Southern Strategy came next.
You can try arguing that racism has stopped, but the Republicans actively courted and actively supported racism from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, at least.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Ah, yes, please, continue to ignore the utter and complete restructuring of parties that I said happened in the mid-60, and pretend the Democratic party that the racists were forced out of in the 50s and 60s and the Republican party that they moved to are the same parties as back then.
It was Eisenhower (you know, the REPUBLICAN President) who desegregated Little Rock, not the great democratic emancipators Truman or Roosevelt or Kennedy. The Civil Rights Act was the first time the Democrats stepped on the stage to be a positive factor in race.
Unless, of course, you count Truman desegregating the military, you know, several years earlier, and ended discrimination by the Federal government in hiring. But besides that, the Democrats had done nothing. *rolls eyes*
And, of course, Eisenhower was complying with a Supreme Court decision. He didn't just decide to end segregation in schools, unlike the Northern Democrats and Northern Republicans who, a decade later, did pass various civil rights acts. (Resulting in those Republicans getting kicked out of their own party and joining the Democrats.)
In fact, while in the military, Eisenhower helped enforce the segregation that still existed under FDR. Painting him as a hero for being in office at the moment the Supreme Court demanded desegregation is stupid.
I'm glad he didn't back down, I can only imagine the state the country would be in if states felt they had the right to ignore the Federal government, but there's no evidence he did it out of any moral disapproval of segregation, as opposed to a belief that the Federal government had to be strong, and a belief that the supreme court could make the decision.
And you're wrong with 'Republican party NEVER supported segregation'.
Since you brought up Eisenhower, you're factually wrong there. If you'd said 'No Republicans supported segregation since the mid-60 reorganization', you'd be correct, although mostly because, duh, it had been unconstitutional since 1954, and supporting that would be a rather eccentric position to take. (Although George Wallace did take it.)
However, if you're using all of American history, you're just factually wrong. Lincoln had no problem with segregation, for example, and supported it in general.
Yes, I'm sure it's 'unfair' to include Lincoln, but your history is just as stupid. People started worrying about segregation and discrimination for the first time(1) during FDR, and he didn't do much, but started undoing the parts of it that were within his power, and Truman continued to do that.
Before that, Republicans and Democrats had no problem with either segregation or discrimination in general. After opinion in society moved away from it, we had two Democratic presidents, who actually tries to move away from those things, although, of course, presidents don't make the law, and they both had other rather important things to do with. (A depression and a war.)
And then Brown vs. Board of Education happened, and it stopped being a damn political issue at all, at least not one you could be 'for' or 'against'.
1) For any statistically important amount, and by 'people' I mean 'white people'. As black people often couldn't vote, how they felt about their lack of vote and other discrimination wasn't really relevant, politically.