Posted on 06/11/2010 12:08:05 PM PDT by jazusamo
The campaign of defeated Democratic Senate candidate Vic Rawl has assembled a team of national academic experts to review Tuesday’s perplexing South Carolina primary results that propelled a virtually unknown, underfunded and unemployed candidate to the party’s nomination over a veteran officeholder and public official.
Rawl campaign manager Walter Ludwig tells POLITICO three different teams of experts in election data analysis are combing through the results in the state’s 46 counties and already turning up some eye-opening trend lines.
The review is in response to the shocking victory by 32-year-old Alvin Greene, who, despite never giving a campaign speech or running any television or radio ads, managed to handily defeat Rawl 59 percent to 41 percent. The state party chairwoman has already asked Greene to step aside, and Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) has speculated that he might be a Republican plant.
Greene has pledged to remain in the race and said he has “always been a Democrat.”
While Ludwig cautioned that the campaign is not jumping to any conclusions, he said the experts, who volunteered their services, have already uncovered some “curious” findings in the election data.
One potential red flag: A significant difference between the results of absentee and election day ballots.
According to Ludwig, of the state’s 46 counties, half have a disparity of greater than 10 percentage points between the absentee and election day ballots.
“The election day ballots all favor Mr. Greene. We don’t know what it means,” Ludwig said in an interview. “We did significantly better on absentees than Election Day, which is according to the mathematicians, quite significant. The other reason is, it didn’t happen in any other races on the ballot.”
In Lancaster County, Rawl won absentee ballots over Greene by a staggering 84 percent to 16 percent margin; but Greene easily led among Election Day voters by 17 percentage points.
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.
“In only two of 88 precincts, do the number of votes Greene got plus the number we got equal the total cast,” Ludwig said.
Greene also racked up a 75 percent or greater margin in one-seventh of all precincts statewide, a mark that Ludwig notes is even difficult for an incumbent to reach.
“This may add up to nothing. This all could be a clerical error. We don’t know but thought it was worth looking into,” said Ludwig, who added that the experts doing the unpaid research asked that their names not be revealed until they disclose their conclusions.
Ludwig said the experts could be prepared to offer their findings by late Friday but cautioned that it’s likely not to be definitive.
“These are not detectives, they look at huge amounts of election data that say this doesn’t look like it should, or it does,” he said.
Asked what else could explain Greene’s unlikely rise, Ludwig appeared to be at a loss.
He said the campaign sent out 300,000 e-mails, conducted a quarter -million robocalls and logged nearly 17,000 miles to Democratic events around the state.
“I was tracking the guy everywhere and there was nothing to track. Am I kicking myself in the ass? Sure. I’m just not sure what we would’ve done different,” he said.
He had to have scored pretty well on his ASVAB or he wouldn't have been allowed to join the Army. I have a feeling he wasn't a missile repairman, but still... BTW, is it illegal for him to have borrowed or been gifted the $10,400 filing fee?
Robert Plant is probably pretty green by now.
"Guys, I swear... It was only supposed to give the guy one vote for every 100 votes cast. I don't know what happened... Maybe I got the registers mixed up or something and the guy got 10 votes for every vote cast.
"I knew we shouldn't have agreed to do this. Now we're going to Federal Pound Me In The Ass Prison."
-PJ
But how did anyone know that if he had no ads and no one had heard of him before?
I thought his interviews were really amusing.
Was he interviewed before the election?
Possibly the name thing makes sense. I suppose another factor could be that the voters just hated the other candidate.
No it’s not illegal to get the filing fee from someone else, but the money must be declared on the quarterly financial form. This keeps people from donating a dishonest amount of money to anyone’s campaign.
BTW, Green as never filed any financial forms thus far.
ZIP. NADA.
Either he files an amended form immediately, or he gets another felony investigation. This time for election fraud.
See Loretta [s]Brixey[/s] Sanchez for another example.
My only question - how much did he campaign in the black underground media? Any radio guest spots on 'urban' radio? Any spots in those weird one-sheet papers that few people read? Word of mouth?
Barring massive fraud (certainly a possibility), he had to have done something - we're just not looking in the right places yet.
You would be correct. SC is 29.2% black and they vote 95% Democrat. About 24% of the non-black population regularly votes for democrats and they will not vote for Jim Demint under any circumstance. They will vote for Greene or not vote in the Senate race at all.
Greene will get 30-35% of the popular vote if he stays on the ballot.
Greene looked black to Gray.
That is pretty funny. Community organizer doesn’t know who the candidates are that he’s voting for. Votes for his candidate based on whether the name sounds black or white. Ends up guessing right—votes for the black guy, but the black guy turns out to be an idiot who’s charged with a felony. How much you wanna bet this guy still hasn’t learned anything?
o/~ Ebony and Ivory... o/~
Thanks!
Greene is not likely to be able to find his way to DC to meet with Pelosi and Reid.
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