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.
exactly! who could even think to come up with this particular candidate as a plant? he's not an attractive candidate in any aspect... why would the GOP choose him? on paper, it's not likely that he would win... hahaha! this Alvin Greene guy has accomplished something here... he is the Dem nominee... i hope he is offended at how his party is treating him... i want him to play the race card...
Career felon with no skills vs. career politician. Hmmm. That's a false choice! They're the same thing!
I really don’t understand why everyone is in a flop sweat over this. We are dealing with a voting public that elected Obama!!! Hello??
This makes total sense. It really does. There are a lot of black people in SC. The last name "Greene" with the "e" on the end evidently is a surname commonly seen among black people. This is no stranger than if an Italian person voted for someone named Tony Soprano, knowing it would be an Italian.
Rawl is just flipped out because he lost. Evidently despite all his money and campaigning he didn't spend enough time ensuring the black people knew who he was. Big mistake. Or maybe they did know and don't want him in office. Tough luck Rawl. Get over yourself; you lost.
Correct!
No sh**, Sherlock.
... and for Spartanburg County.
Greene lied? He’ll fit in perfectly in the Senate. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi should be phoning him right about now.
There is indeed something strange about this event. I saw the Greene interview with Olberdick. I almost felt sorry for the poor guy, then reminded myself he’s a democrat. The guy can just barely speak, like talking is a challenge for him.
This will be the perfect test case for how much of the voting population simply pulls the lever for a party rather than a candidate. If this guy stays on the ballot, I suspect he will still get 30% to 40% of the vote.
He won’t win though. DeMint will thump him.
i think this illustrate just how easy DEMOCRATS can cheat the system. Theres a Democrat out there who support Greene and have generated lots of fake votes for him. If they could do that during the primaries, imagine what they could do for the general election
That would have been because Mr Greene ran a very unconventional primary campaign, inasmuch as he ran literally no campaign whatsoever. Thus Mr Rawl assumed, wrongly as it turns out, that he had victory in the bag, without doing anything...
the infowarrior
Hey—maybe the Republicans have come up with their own secret version of ACORN.
FWIW, the surname Greene is more common among blacks than whites IIRC.
If he wasn’t a felon before he was elected, he probably would be eventually.
I don’t think race had anything to do with it. He was first on a list of nobody’s. There were other black candidates in the election. I live in South Carolina and never heard of the guy until the election results. It is sad when we have idiots voting for someone they did not know. I guess that is how Dear Leader was elected President in this country.
Much simpler explanation: People who go to the trouble to get absentee ballots are generally more tuned into politics and more knowledgeable. It takes considerably more effort than just showing up to vote on election day, which any dummy can do. And there are a lot of dummies, particularly on the Democrat side.
I don't see a clean way the Democrats can extricate themselves from this mess. If they succeed in forcing Greene off the ballot, they will be seen as elitist or even racist..
If they just write off the election, then they will free DeMint (one of the rising stars of conservatism and a potential candidate for 2010) to campaign for other conservatives and raise his profile outside the state. A convincing win in the 70-80% range would also provide strong evidence that DeMint appeals to more than just white conservatives.
Neither is a particularly attractive choice.
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