Come on, folks, how can anyone look at the bare facts and not recognize that something stinks? Alvin Greene, an unemployed veteran living with his father and surviving on unemployment benefits since his honorable but involuntarily discharge after 13 years of service, qualified for a public defender on a felony obscenity charge but managed to come up with over $10,000 for his candidacy filing fee. Yet, no one but Keith Olbermann in the MSM thinks this is something they should investigate, despite the weakness of the two reasons being given for Greene’s win: (1) that the "e" at the end of Greene’s name is supposed to be a clue that he’s African-American and got him a large share of the black vote, and (2) that voters didn’t know either candidate and so Greene just happened to win. Neither reason/excuse can account for (a) the wide disparity between the absentee vote and the election day vote or (b) the percentage by which Greene won the election day vote itself (59-41 or 18%). And yet, even DailyKos has no main articles on this highly suspicious election, although Tom Schaller has posted on this twice on FiveThirtyEight. More ...
(Updated slightly in the paragraph below regarding the absentee ballot return)
Meg Kinnard’s AP article about "conspiracy theories" is typical of the cynical eye with which most of the MSM has approached this story. Yet, the article itself raises some of the most obvious questions about Greene’s candidacy and win. First, and most blatantly, where on earth did he get the $10,440 filing fee for his candidacy? Greene claimed, when interviewed by Keith Olbermann on "Countdown," that the money was his (later stating that it came from two years of saved-up service pay), yet he would not have qualified for a public defender if he had over $10,000 just sitting in a bank account (in fact, when requesting a public defender, Greene claimed that he had no assets). Greene has violated election laws by not filing any campaign finance or other disclosure papers. So, why hasn’t the mainstream media "followed the money" by now and uncovered who gave him the money for the filing fee?
SOMEONE obviously planted Alvin Greene in this race; that’s a no-brainer. Greene, when being interviewed by Keith Olbermann, was passionless and unable to articulate any concerns or agenda in response to Olbermann’s question as to why he was running for office, giving only an extremely bland and vague answer. In fact, Greene throughout the interview clearly seemed to be receiving answers from someone – he waited before answering every question, but seemed uncomfortable articulating some of his own responses, as though the answers were unfamiliar to him. See Olbermann’s reporting and his interview with Greene for yourself.
As to Greene’s apparently winning the primary, even more questions come to mind.
I become immediately suspicious whenever an election vote tally is close to or beyond the margin of error of day-before polls or, especially, exit polls, or when there is a big discrepancy between absentee ballots and election day returns. In the Greene-Rawl race, the theory that people didn’t know either candidate and so Greene won simply by chance is belied by the 18 point spread in the election day returns, which goes far beyond the roughly 50-50 spread one would expect from sheer chance. Even Greene’s name appearing before Rawl’s on the ballot would not add more than a few points. The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics website includes a page summarizing a number of scholarly studies of ballot placement effect on voting results. Top placement on a ballot does indeed provide a positive bias, and the effect of top placement is magnified when the candidates are unknown, but the average positive bias of 2.5 percent (Miller and Krosnick 1998) is only doubled to 5.2 (Brockington 2003) for unknown candidates. Greene’s winning margin is almost triple that which would be expected from his position on the ballot.
Tom Schaller of FiveThirtyEight reports here and here on the questionable results and notes that the statistical anomalies are significant enough to have raised questions for two electoral scholars (Dr. Walter Mebane of the University of Michigan and Dr. Michael Miller of Cornell University) consulted by but unaffiliated with the Rawl campaign. According to a press release issued by the Rawl campaign, University of Michigan's Dr. Mebane "performed second-digit Benford’s law tests on the precinct returns from the Senate race ... [which] 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."
As for the theory that Greene got the black vote by a large margin because his name was some sort of clue, well, it is just plain ludicrous. Although proposed by black state senator and gubernatorial candidate Robert Ford, I know of no sociologists, cultural anthropologists, political scientists, or other experts who have suggested this, and it is noteworthy that longtime black U.S. Congressman and House majority whip Jim Clyburn, who is probably more knowledgeable about racial dynamics in South Carolina elections than anyone else, has explicitly stated that the Greene-Rawl election results don’t follow party or racial patterns and that, in fact, he believes that Greene may be a Republican plant. (Actually, there are a number of whites – including white politicians – with the name Greene, as Schaller points out.)
Secondly, Rawl campaign manager Walter Ludwig provided in an e-mail to Tom Schaller at FiveThirtyEight some comparative statistics in other statewide white v. black races – especially the one other statewide white-black race – that show just how unlikely this theory is: "It’s hard to attribute [the Greene-Rawl election results] to strictly racial preference voting: 65,000 people voted for either Jim Rex or Vincent Shaheen, the two white gubernatorial candidates, and also voted for Greene. Only 33,000 people voted for Robert Ford, the black gubernatorial candidate. There was one other contested race between a white candidate and a black candidate: Superintendent of Education. Both campaigned, and Tommy Thompson, the black candidate, was very well-qualified (though originally from out-of-state). The white guy, Frank Holleman, won by 14 points, and Greene ran ahead of Thompson by 40%." Yet, we are expected to believe that, despite no publicity or advertising (not even a website, Facebook page, or Twitter account) and with little or no clue from his name, Greene carried all but four counties statewide, including a number of majority-white districts (as opposed to the all but ten counties won by Frank Holleman, the white candidate in the other statewide white-black Democratic race, where both candidates campaigned heavily) ostensibly by somehow snagging a huge proportion of the black vote ... but only on election day, not among absentee voters.
This brings me to what is perhaps most suspicious from a statistical perspective: the huge discrepancy between the absentee ballots and election day results given that there was no last-minute negative publicity to produce a drop in Rawl’s popularity (he easily won the absentee ballot count) and there was no publicity at all about Greene. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find in South Carolina's own online data a breakdown between absentee votes and election day votes - i.e., the data provided on South Carolina's website are identical for the categories "election day" and "total" - so I am relying on the figures published in the media. Given that caveat, the figures are astounding. Ludwig told David Catanese of Politico that "of the state’s 46 counties, half have a disparity of greater than 10 percentage points between the absentee and election day ballots." Catanese reports one particularly egregious example: "For instance, 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." Overall, Dr. Michael Miller of Cornell University found that "Rawl performs 11 percentage points better among absentee voters than he does among Election Day voters," according to the Rawl campaign press release cited above. That would flip the win results, with Rawl receiving 52 percent against Greene's 48 percent. In fact, those numbers make much more statistical sense given Greene's complete lack of exposure and Rawl's very limited exposure.
The Rawl press release also quoted Miller as stating, "This difference is a clear contrast to the other races. Statistically speaking, the only other Democratic candidate who performed differently among the two voter groups was Robert Ford, who did better on Election Day than among absentees in the gubernatorial primary." These results should be raising major alarms everywhere since the differences were negligible and statistically insignificant in EVERY OTHER statewide race held except the most highly publicized one (the governor race), which also had the highest number of visible candidates (three). So, not only is there a a very high discrepancy between the absentee ballots and the election day returns, but that level of discrepancy between absentee ballots and election day returns is not matched by ANY other Democratic primary returns (in fact, only one - the most publicized - has any kind of statistically significant discrepancy). Is anyone getting suspicious NOW???
So, how could Greene have won by such a large margin when there is no credible theory to account for it? Well, there is, in fact, a perfectly credible theory which AP reporter Meg Kinnard and others choose to characterize as a "conspiracy theory": that, because South Carolina uses "black box" voting machines (i.e., ones which do not provide voter-verifiable paper receipts which can be used for a credible recount), the results have been manipulated at some level(s): individual voting machines, precinct totals, and/or tabulators operating at a county or other multi-precinct level. Crooks and Liars blogger "karoli" discusses documented past problems with the ES&S IVotronic voting machines used in South Carolina, their "black box" nature and – also documented – the machines’ vulnerability to viruses and hacking (not to mention mechanical failure); s/he sees the Greene-Rawl election results as another example of the machines’ unreliability and corrupted returns and asks why these machines have not yet been outlawed.
Finally, most in the MSM question the motive Republicans would have for planting a candidate and fixing the election since South Carolina is safely Republican for statewide (including national) offices and so DeMint should have the general election wrapped up. Well, while some of his colleagues, such as Chuck Grassley, indeed probably have their November election wrapped up, DeMint is not nearly so well-loved by his state’s residents, regardless of its deep red status. Polls have shown 44% for an unspecified Democratic candidate against 54% for DeMint. This probably has something to do with the large number of outrageous statements DeMint has made and his negative votes on ... well, everything. In any case, regardless of the reasons, his numbers at this point, given his state’s strong Republican leanings, really are much weaker than they should be – DeMint’s seat is not nearly as safe as Grassley’s, despite South Carolina’s being a much more Republican state than Iowa.
So, we have (1) a weak incumbent (relative to his state's political leanings) facing a general election in an anti-incumbent environment; (2) a man with no financial resources and no visible means of support who came up with over $10,000 for his candidate filing fee, and a "black box" voting system that can be manipulated and provides no reliable recount; and (3) gross statistical anomalies in the election day results that differ drastically from paper-trail absentee ballot returns and well-documented statistical probabilities for unknown candidates, and that, so far, have no reasonable explanation beyond vote count manipulation. In other words, there is motive, means, and opportunity, not to mention enough financial questions and statistical anomalies to pique the interest of the most blasé auditor and statistician ... does anyone still think that suspicion of the Greene-Rawl election returns is only for paranoid conspiracy nuts?