http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0616/aclu-south-carolina-erase-voting-records/ The ACLU is wading into the problem. The election is rife with logical inconsistencies. Something is clearly wrong in SC.
Very possibly so. It’s certainly worth a look, worth an investigation. But you know what? You’re still providing a cite that still states the already disproved “more votes for Greene than votes casted” lie.
And you know what else? Even if Rawl got 99.9% of the vote, DeMint still wins in November. It’s a tempest in a teapot.
The best we can hope for is that this spurs South Carolina to adopt voting machines that are provably reliable, that this inspires the state to require a paper trail, and should that happen that’s a victory for democracy, which is all I ask.
I think events of the last year have proved that statement to be true in pretty much every way possible. I say it’s the fluoride in the water.
…or, lack thereof.
Demint has nothing to do with this. However I read Rawl was at 43 percent. That does not make Demint unreachable.
But the machines do not give a paper trail. They should be shitcanned if they can not be graded before, during and after the elections. We can not allow some tabulating company to keep the information to themselves. It belongs to the people.
First off, as my fellow Jesus College Old Member Harold Wilson put it, a week is a long time in politics. DeMint won by less than 10% last go-round, hardly rock solid numbers, and there’s still a long way to go in the campaign.
Secondly, what, we’re going to ignore inconsistencies if the “election wasn’t close”?
Thirdly, despite Bricker’s cite, I’d like to see a little third-party confirmation. His cite seems to state that “the computer says that the computer added up the votes correctly.”
The thing is, if some one was vote fixing, this election may have been an unintended side effect. If the goal was to put the fix in for one of the more hotly contested offices who ever was doing it may have just filled in the rest of the ballot at random. If you read the 538 entries there are statistical anomalies with some of the more meaningful races.
I don’t even care about the actual Senate race. Rawls is doing the people of South Carolina a favor by bringing this issue to the forefront and hopefully resolving it before November. This lack of transparency is undemocratic and shouldn’t be accepted anywhere.
In America we don’t trust exit polls. That is weird because they have been proven to be accurate around the world. They have a long history of being accurate in America too. Now that we have machines recording and tabulating the elections , exit polling is supposed to be flawed and untrustworthy. We use it to determine if other countries are actually holding honest elections. But when they suddenly are no good here ,we blame the methodology of exit polling.
I saw a polling expert explain that in 2004, they tripled the input because in 2000 so many people said they were off because they did not agree with the machines. He said it was statistically impossible to be off in 2004. Yet that is what is claimed. The other option is the machine counts are wrong. That would be very difficult for many people to accept.
How could there be “third party confirmation?”
What process would have to happen to create a third party review?
And for that matter, where is the original evidence of the vote discrepancy? Rawl’s manager made theclaim, but doesn’t say how he determined it or what numbers he was relying upon.
A formal protest, one assumes. Which is what Rawl is trying to make. But merely repeating the numbers which are already under protest proves nothing.
It appears (and I’ve had just as little luck in tracking down what happened as everyone else in this thread), Rawl’s campaign manager just misread or misinterpreted what was in BradBlog. BradBlog made other accusations, but not the one which Rawl’s campaign manager made.
I don’t think he was right at all about that, but there are plenty of things strange about this election even without the “25 precincts” accusation.
The South Carolina Democratic Party’s Executive Committee has upheld Greene’s win over Rawl’s challenge.
This kind of surprises me; it seems like the statistical evidence is pretty strong that something was wrong with the vote counts. I think I expected them to set aside the election results and either schedule a new primary or, more likely, declare Rawls their candidate (which I understand they can do).
I’m surprised that decided to vote against the challenge too (what’s with the half-votes?).
I hope Rawl pending complaint with the Federal Election Commission gets some traction though. It would be nice to know if there were any irregularities, especially in light of statments given at the committee hearing about unusual ocurrences with the voting mahines. I would also like the State Law Enforcement Division to look into how Greene got the money for the filing fee. If it’s from his Army savings and he’s unemployed, why in the world would he spend his life savings to run for office, unless it’s some kind of compulsive fixation for him? It seems like that, since I don’t feel any real conviction behind his haltingly stated beliefs when he speaks. And if his run is based on a compulsive fixation, while he still has a right to run, the voters need to be able to take that into account, as necessary. And if, as suggested by a friend of mine, that it’s some nefarious backer but “just someone with $10,000 who wanted to see what happens,” there’s nothing stopping them from doing that but it just seems wrong.
Not enough gain for the risks involved. It is unlikely that DeMint will be defeated, whoever is his opponent, so there is no real world political reason to fight this battle. However, if the Democrats can Greene over Rawls they have offered the Republicans a club to hit them with for years to come. “The Democrats overturned the will of the people in electing an African-American, a veteran, who used his own Army money - and only his own money - when they kicked Alvin Greene to the curb. They wanted a unpopular white man, Vic Rawls, not the duly nominated African American veteran Alvin Greene. Can you trust them not to invalidate your, the voters of SC, choice again? Vote for insert Republican Candidate’s Name Here! We will listen to the voters in the great state of South Carolina. ” You get the idea.
If there was a real, easily understood smoking, gun hey might do it. But without something very tangible they could go on TV and point to saying ”This is how the election was stolen…” overturning the primary would be political suicide.
For starters, the voting machine company could release the code their machines used. The usual objection is that this would be a breach in security, but anyone who knows anything about actual security knows that the opposite is true: Arguing that keeping voting machine code secret increases security because knowing the code would help people to breach it is like arguing that the laws should be kept secret because knowing the law helps people to circumvent it.
On a side note, I totally just had a short conversation with Alvin Greene on the phone. This blows my mind.
What were the circumstances, and what did you learn?
Well his number is publicly available, so I thought what the heck given my interest in the story. I didn’t seriously expect him to answer, but alas I soon heard a lot of raucous laughter in the background followed by that very distinctive voice.
It was very brief, mostly because I didn’t want to be a jerk to a guy when I was calling his house, and that didn’t leave a whole lot to say.
I just said I was very interested in his story and I congratulated him on his favorable result at the Dem meeting last night. He just quietly said “yes” over and over again, then he asked me where I was from and I told him, then he said he had to go and that was it.
So it was pretty much what you’d expect, he was very uncommunicative. But he was nice enough about it and I give him an A+ for accessibility.
Raucous laughter? Huh. Guess I shouldn’t read too much into that, though it’s hard not to given the semiotics we tend to apply to folks in the public eye.