Vic Rawl: 'Systemic' Failures In South Carolina Voting Systems
A candidate in South Carolina's Democratic Senate primary has called for an investigation into his defeat. Former Rep. Vic Rawl announced Monday that
Greene handily defeated opponent Vic Rawl in Tuesday's primary, winning with 59 percent of the vote to Rawl' 41 percent, despite not having run any sort of visible campaign, not having set up a campaign Web site, and being unemployed. And it quickly emerged that Greene is facing a felony obscenity charge over an incident in which he allegedly showed a college student obscene photos from the Internet.
House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) suspects Greene is a "plant." Clyburn is familiar with dirty tricks in South Carolina elections. "I know a Democratic pattern, I know a Republican pattern, and I saw in the Democratic primary, elephant dung all over the place. So I knew something was wrong in that primary. And this result tells us that," Clyburn told CNN Sunday.
NBC's David Gregory asked Senior White House Advisor David Axelrod Sunday if Greene was a legitimate candidate. "It doesn't appear so to me. It was a mysterious deal," said Axelrod.
The Brad Blog's Brad Friedman has also theorized that voting machines may have been tampered with. Green managed to receive more votes that were actually cast in 25 counties. And while Rawl won the absentee ballots by 68 points, Greene won on election day by 18 points.
The vast majority ballots cast on voting day were on unverifiable electronic voting machines, according to Friedman.
South Carolina uses ES&S' 100% unverifiable Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, in this case touch-screen) voting machines at the polling place. The machines, also used in many other states (such as Arkansas, where we recently reported exclusively on the disappearance of thousands of votes on May 18th, which neither state nor local officials are able to explain to this day) are both oft-failed and easily manipulated in such a way that it's almost impossible to detect the systems have been gamed.
Rawl has assembled a panel of experts to advise him on filing the protest.
"We feel from the three different sets of experts that we're dealing with, one, of course, is dealing with the statistical analysis of the data. The second of course is the political outcome of the races historically and the third group is dealing with the software and computer science aspect of it. All three groups indicate that there are difficulties, and it appears to be systemic," said Rawl.