Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The South Carolina Primary and Voting Machine Fraud

Posted by kdawson on from the good-ol'-politics dept.

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."

1 of 467 comments (clear)

  1. Re:He Won! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant

    He apparently DID win.

    I live in SC people. There was no shadowy evil GOP conspiracy. This is what happened: The state Democrat party, knowing that whoever they nominated would have almost no chance against Jim DeMint, spent little to no money on the race. That resulted in a slate of unknowns that most folks didn't know who were. People are stupid & don't take the time to educate themselves about the candidates they're voting for, so they voted for the first name (Alvin Greene). It's as simple as that. Even if Rawls had won the primary he'd still not have a snowball's chance in Hell against DeMint.

    PEBVMAC