The South Carolina Primary and Voting Machine Fraud 467
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."
Checksum failures... (Score:3, Informative)
If you are going to cheat, at least be smart... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
No (Score:2, Informative)
Just no. There's 10 percent chance of a type 1 error, assuming the null hypothesis (no cheating) is true.
Re:He Won! (Score:3, Informative)
A couple of basic information pieces (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Checksum failures... (Score:5, Informative)
All in all, none of this makes any sense. There's no motive on either side. Why would Republicans poison a Democrat primary for a safely Republican seat? Why would Democrats not want to put forth the best candidate? Something does smell, but the most plausible explanation is simple voting machine tallying error with no nefarious purpose behind it.
Re:Alvin Greene isn't unknown (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Open Primary (Score:3, Informative)
Re:He Won! (Score:3, Informative)
>>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.
Snow Job (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Poor research (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Rawl didn't campaign either . . . (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Open Primary (Score:1, Informative)
First, there's no such thing as a "democrat party" it's called the "democratic party"
Second, this isn't an R vs D problem, it's a physics problem because humans can not see the electronic signals inside these (doped with no oversight) pieces of silicone, regardless of the arrangement which is going to electronically represent in digital logic the tabulation of these election ballots. A poll watcher is a moot point, when you were not present 24/7 from the initial doping process, through assembly, manufacture, and down to deployment at the local polling place level, where you and I vote.
Third, when you can't provide oversight, you have garbage in, when your trying to tabulate garbage, you end up with garbage.
Fourth, being as there's no audit "trail" , and no human oversight from start to finish, you can't recount unvalidatable trash.
Fifth, the final outcome is always destructive, by electing oath breaking termites, everything becomes corrupted by propagating more oath breakers to destroy more stuff, and release everything from accountability of the existing law.
Sixth, you can quote all the fucking numbers you want, the reality is you still haven't counted the peoples vote.
Seventh, I give you Kudo's on also correctly recognizing the fact that electronic parts fail sometimes, for no reason, they fail, and for reasons they fail, they can burn out, they can overheat and give really weird output, but the sad fact is nobody is destructively reverse engineering these devices for exploits of malicious intent. Just cause something's burnt up, doesn't mean it failed, it may have failed with a purpose internally, like changing it's internal logic around and burning the channel shut. Clearly electronic semi conductors can not ever be trusted with this in mind as every machine would need to be destroyed to be audited fully for tampering, and even then, we still might not SEE it!
Now here's my opinion. (I didn't say fact) You want an open primary? Fine, Outlaw all electronic vote tabulation devices, and have an election which uses all paper ballots, all counted by all publicly interested parties, the public must provide 24/7 chain of custody, from the moment the poll opens to the moment the entire election is finally tabulated, and even then it ought be stored in a vault afterward with oversight from all interested public parties. Or transported to a vault by all interested parties. Where ever it goes it can not be allowed to have the "chain of custody" tampered with. If it is tampered with, then the election must start over. The other part of this is reform the way the SOS does it's policies and procedures. You can't have a corrupt sheriff in charge of kicking poll watchers out, and especially at the expense of breaking the "chain of custody" , which if you happen to look right now, not many deputies have asm programming and electronic manufacturing under their belt. So clearly local LEO (Law enforcement for short) is being exploited by whatever politician wants to put pressure or just straight up conspire to steal shit (like we already have seen.) [crypto.com] So clearly there has to be some kind of check to this kind of exploit of power. Perhaps specifically trained election cops, to counter it all, and if need be they call local LEO for assist. But the days of rolling up poll watchers on faux charges, then releasing them after the election is over, breaking the chain of custody, has to stop for it to work. I really hope your feeling what I am saying here.
The next problem is the Electoral College. And I don't know what to say about that, personally I want it outlawed also, but FIRST these electronic vote tabulation devices have to go! Buy Paper, Pay humans, uh, if you can't get workers, do it like we do Jury Duty, your called to duty, you serve.
The other thing which I have been saying all along now, is this is literally a national security problem.
You don't know who is electing our reps. Could be the chip manufacturer in Korea, or China. You don't know though, because you haven't looked.
Re:A couple of basic information pieces (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Poor research (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:A couple of basic information pieces (Score:3, Informative)
In Spartanburg County, Ludwig said there are 25 precincts in which Greene received more votes than were actually cast and 50 other precincts where votes appeared to be missing from the final count. Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/38433.html#ixzz0qvgQEa5m [politico.com]
Re:He Won! (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:He Won! (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Checksum failures... (Score:3, Informative)