The Alvin Greene Mystery Theories, Explained

Excellent story Phil..thanks for showing some of your colleagues(Colby& Tommy) what a fair and balanced piece of reporting looks like.

In sum: Republicans aren’t smart enough to pull off something like this.

FiveThirtyEight.com ran an article last Friday that reported the findings of people who do statistical analyses of these sorts or situations. They put aside as highly unlikely Republican cross-over voting and several other scenarios. The one which came up worth further investigation was vote count tampering. SC uses Diebold voting machines which have been cause for concern in other locations, and banned in some. If someone did mess with the machines, it was done on machines in every county in SC, or maybe all but 4 counties. If this is even a remote possibility, it needs to be run to the ground. It really doesn’t matter who the candidate is, or what the party is, any suspicion of vote tampering, especially on these machines which don’t leave a paper trail, is VERY serious and needs to be resolved.

Very typical
when the democrats are embarrassed they do what they know best…. blame someone else!
But at all cost never take responsibility

Yes Republicans have never whined about voter fraud and blamed someone or something else for election troubles. So me1ranger what’s your take on this? When I asked before you never answered.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/06/still-no-election-paperwork-from-alvin-greene/58118/

Paul..seems like all the known facts are represented in the above story. Whined about voter fraud..are you kidding? One should be outraged at the mere possibility of any. I want my side to win in a fair fight only, period. SL is trying to blame Greenes win on voteing machines. Seems a little desperate..the way I read it, all the votes were accounted for. We’ll see how this turns out. I think he won because of painfully ignorant and race inspired voters..bottom line.

voting..my bad

But if he didn’t campaign at all, how did he get so many votes? Because people saw his picture on TV or something?

paulmdoro says:
June 14, 2010 at 1:30 pm
But if he didn’t campaign at all, how did he get so many votes? Because people saw his picture on TV or something?

Perhaps when they looked at the ballot, they just chose the other guy (to spite Rawl)?

Looks like the Dems got their own Forrest Gump as a candidate and just want a do-over….

Run Forrest Run!

After that big, long, back and forth yesterday, I’m going to try to avoid wading into Mr. Greene too deep for the time being, but my understanding of the South Carolina system is that a voter would request a Republican or a Democratic ballot, so you couldn’t vote in both primaries. (IOW: You couldn’t vote in the hotly-contested GOP for Gov, then vote in the Dem for Senate)

Good piece, Phillip. I love how many in the left-wing media are trying to say that this was some coordinated effort on the part of Republicans to get tens of thousands of Republicans to turn out and vote for this guy….yet, it was so secretive that NO ONE ever caught wind of it. Maybe, just maybe, dems went to the polls and voted for the guy at the top of the list with a “D” next to their name. Hell, as dumb as this guy has proved to be, bathtub boy said he’d vote for him. There you go…case solved.

Now, where’s the smoking gun on this one? It’s kind of obvious and I’m surprised that there’s been no follow up on where Mr. Green got the $10,440 to register as a candidate. Let’s face it, the good people of South Carolina are not known for choosing intelligent, enlightened morally honest politicians so one has to assume that there’s been some hanky-panky on this one. This is a job for that super sleuth comedic native of Charleston, Stpehen Colbert.

The black congressman from SC said that black voters recognized the spelling of ‘Greene’ to be in keeping with their community. So he speculates that’s why they pulled the lever for him. It sucks..but that’s what they get for being so shallow. Made bed..lay in it!!

SL – the FiveThirtyEight piece you mention is here:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/06/sc-democratic-primary-getting-weirder.html

Hadn’t seen it – it’s a good one, if uber-wonky.

Yeah lonestar77 it’s entirely possible that nothing nefarious took place and people just voted for the guy at the top of the list with a ‘D’ next to their name. This sure is entertaining though.

OK – One more… A product of that big, long, back and forth was a pointer to a new feature from a Columbia alt-weekly from my sparring partner.

Of course, you can read the entire article, but if you scroll down to the sub-head about the undertaker, we learn that Alvin’s father had been a Democratic activist, who advocated African-American involvement. So, the fact that Alvin says that he’s always been a Democrat shouldn’t be a surprise.

Magister – good point. That is how it was done in California, but I can’t immediately find the rules for SC online.

The math stays the same, of course – if people crossed party lines to submarine Rawl, a higher percentage of them would likely have voted in the Senatorial race.

Whoops! I miscoded the alt-weekly link and can’t edit (or fix my other error)

Also @Alan Leventhal: I do think that the source of the filing fee should certainly be looked into, but the county coroner tells the alt-weekly that Alvin’s father has some money, he could’ve saved from the military and @Phillip, if Alvin’s father was an old activist who had encouraged involvement, he could quite possibly know what kind of paperwork would be required.

@Phillip: I’m just basing the ballot thing on conversational tweets from people down there, who have said that with the Governor’s race so close, it was unlikely that a lot of Republicans would ask for the “wrong” ballot.

…and while I’m at it, to clarify my last comment: The coroner says that Mr. Greene senior has money and that in addition to being an activist, he has been something of an entrepreneur. Of course, it was Alvin who could’ve saved from the military, but unfortunately, my previous phrasing didn’t make that clear.

Even if Greene was a plant by Republicans, how do you explain him winning the election? Unless there is some strange anomaly in the vote tallies, like 40,000 extra ballots or something, I don’t get how being a plant explains his win.

And if he is a plant, that makes it even more ridiculous that people voted for him. I think this just goes to show how *well* they vote in SC….

And, just a question, if some republican paid his $10K fee, but didn’t do any vote tampering, is that illegal? The people still voted for the guy. (Just wondering.)

Sounds to me like it is just more finger pointing by the Dems. They are embarrassed that such a door knob could win (again) in SC.

Well, if they had a “NONE OF THE ABOVE”, that would have won and we wouldn’t have a problem with Greene. But, hey, give it to this guy for finding his own job.

This article leaves out the theory mentioned in Friday’s New York Times:

“It is another embarrassment for South Carolina, said Carl F. Jackson Jr, a graphic designer at a local newspaper, The Clarendon Citizen…adding his own theory of how Mr. Greene had won. ‘Maybe voters thought it was the singer, Al Green.’”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/12/us/politics/12greene.html

sarainitaly, you are right on…..did you note the recent altercation in South Carolina? Seems a Dem Rep. put his hand on a young man trying to be a “reporter”…..interesting….check it out on Breitbart.com or eyeblast.com

@sarainitaly: Somewhere around here I have an old copy of the election laws from when I was setting-up a PAC pre-web, but I can’t lay my hands on it at this moment, it is old and I’m too lazy to Google, nonetheless…

If the money wasn’t Alvin’s, then there could be some questions regarding the legality of the donation, but I’m going to guess that it could be finessed. And if the money had came from the father, then I’m going to toss t in with his reluctance to talk about the felony charges… he doesn’t want to risk getting himself or anyone else into deeper trouble.

One local man suggested, and this theory is as good as any other, that the people thought they were voting for the singer, Al Green. (Or, at least, the famous singer inadvertently provided name recognition.) This might help explain the vote count, although the mystery of the $10,400 registration fee remains unsolved. At any rate, this strange case seems a perfect example of the term: “low-information voter.”

Everybody thinks there must be some sort of conspiracy theory to get this guy elected? Why? Because he’s black? A black man can’t win fair & square? Racists! A bunch of racists!

Ahh, that’s fun. Now, I know what it’s like to be a race-baiting lefty.

sorry “North Caroline”..my bad!!

Seems to me that in either scenario, the dems are admitting that dem voters are stupid. Sort of like the butterfly ballots in Palm Beach.

Anyway, the dems court idiots, welfare queens, inner city riff raff, and any other dreg of society they can give a ballot to, and then bitch about having to dance with who brought ‘em.

Seems to me that the political doorknobs in SC know no political affiliation. Cuts both ways. lanquihue who are these candidates you speak of?

Abe: “… and that government of the people, by the people, for the people…”

As long as you have ten thousand bucks to spare, otherwise, you’re not invited. Abe didn’t really mean that, after all, he knew that only elitists should be allowed in.

Isn’t pretty much every politician an elitist?

Yes, that’s the point. The common man is not allowed in. About twenty five years ago, I wanted to run for state senate. Being employed full time and single at the time, I simply did not have the time necessary nor a wife or whatever to keep up with the constant financial probes. The current system almost demands that you have either party sponsorship or a lawyer to look after you.

“The current system almost demands that you have either party sponsorship or a lawyer to look after you.”

Yeah at the very least.

Mr. Bump,

I’m sure you believe that mainstream American (those outside NY, DC, Boston . . .) aren’t smart or sophisticated enough to be “Machiavelli voters,” but theres a long history of voters being calcuting in open primaries.

- Here in Michigan, Republican voters in 96 (i believe) strongly supported the weakest Dem candidate, Jeff Fieger, because they knew that the incumbant gov. could easily defeat him.

- In 2000, the Dems did the same (to embarass Bush the Younger) by voting to John McCain.

- If I’m not mistaken, Republican voters came out for Hilliary Clinton in `08 because they wanted the Dem primary to drag on and on.

So maybe the SC voters aren’t a bunch of idiots like you think they are.

Scott_in_MI -
At no point do I imply that voters in South Carolina are idiots, nor do I think they are. When I suggest that they aren’t Machiavellian, I simply meant that there probably aren’t, in a decentralized way, thousands and thousands plotting to undermine an already weak candidate for Senate.

In at least the last example you cite, Republicans were coaxed to action, in that case by Rush Limbaugh, among others. In the election last week, there is absolutely no evidence that anyone acted similarly on behalf of Greene.

As for your assumption that I am biased on behalf of the East Coast: I went to high school and college in Ohio. Good friends of my wife and I are actually Republicans from South Carolina.

You know what they say about assumptions.

Time to “fess up” Mr. President:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHxb_vZe7Ao

The stats do not indicate how many independent voters participated in the election. Since they have open Primaries in South Carolina, they can vote for either candidate. This could have been the difference that made Greene the victor in this election.

Dean Owen Carter -

With the exception of Horry county, the vote totals for each county align precisely with the Dem / Rep vote total combination – a total which accounts for the numbers above.

In other words, even if you take out the independent vote (whatever such vote existed), the numbers above are what you’d get, and Greene would still win.

But great point.

These are interesting comments. Some of my own ideas on this and other subjects are expressed on my blog, whose address is http://reykr.livejournal.com/.

By coincidence, there’s someone with a similar name, who is thinking outside the box. He is Matt Green, two years younger than Alvin Greene, who is walking across the USA, from coast to coast. Today, he has just left Fargo, North Dakota, heading west across that state, toward Montana.

Fargo is in the “Red River Valley of the north.” The one on the border of Texas and Oklahoma is more famous, since Gene Autry was from there, and he recorded the song “Red River Valley,” I’m pretty sure that song was the theme of the movie version of John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” which was about Okies that headed west to California, during the Depression. Merle Haggard’s family were among them.

Once again, I’ve never voted in South Carolina, but the party affiliation totals may reflect whichever ballot the voter requested and not their own party affiliation.

IOW: If an Independent, who can vote in SC’s open primaries were to request a Republican ballot and that’s what they submitted, then it was likely counted as a Republican vote. Perhaps down the road, when the voting rolls are submitted to Columbia with little tic marks, there may be a mechanism to see how many registered Independents voted and of course the local polling officials could do a preliminary count, but the automated count would have to come from the secret ballot and that would be determined by in which primary, one would choose to vote.

(Does that make sense?)

I don’t understand. The South Carolina State Elections Commission reports that there were a little over 30,000 registered voters (Republican, Democrat, whatever – I got that number from here: http://www.enr-scvotes.org/SC/16117/27900/reports/summary.zip), but yet more than that voted. Am I to assume that there were more than 400,000 independent voters? The way I would understand the count, the registered votes should have been tallied and listed. I guess the SCSEC is only listing those that voted R or D, but yet it appears that a little over 30,000 of the 600,000 or more that cast ballots were registered voters. It’s either that, or the SCSEC is not reporting all of the facts here.

Why the constant use of a booking photo to portray a black man, a black man who is the elected Democrat nominee for US Senate?

An intelligent report from Mr. Bump, the result of considerable work on somebody’s part. Too bad the modern AP is capable of neither intelligence nor much effort on an article.

Who believes that Republicans believe that Sen. DeMint’s reelection faced much threat from Rep. Rawl? Suspicion of a Republican dirty trick tells one about the unreason many on the left display these days.

Mr. Rawl reportedly is protesting the result and will claim irregularities. Perhaps the executive committee of the state’s Democrats will find some irregularities and will command a new primary, or perhaps just decide that Mr. Greene was unqualified as a candidate, awarding the nomination to Mr. Rawl. Carol Fowler, the chief top bossperson for the state’s Democrats, has already asked Mr. Greene to step aside. He refused.

Mr. Greene won with 59% of the primary vote to Mr. Rawl’s 41%. Did voters vote according to color? Mr. Greene is black, Mr. Rawl white. I believe that roughly half of the state’s Democratic voters are black. Did more of them come out this time than whites? (I wouldn’t condemn blacks for voting on color lines, for reasons of both history and sociology.)

Another Greene, Albert, was born in Arkansas. He shaved the last “e” and became Al Green, a gospel singer. He’s pretty good, too, far, far better as a singer than any popster I’ve had to suffer from piped-in noises in supermarkets and drugstores. (Check him out on YouTube.) It’s likely that the South Carolina Greene was aware of the singer and reasoned he had a good chance because of name similarity.

It’s likely that many voters did indeed confuse the two Als. But blacks tend not to vote in primaries, unless there’s a strong reason to do so. Did some publicity before the primary let voters know the skin colors of the two candidates? And did the state’s Democrats jump all over his candidacy before the vote? If not, why not? Did Ms. Fowler and others worry about offending blacks?

And lest anyone dump on South Carolina’s voters, Massachusetts three times elected John F. Kennedy as state treasurer. The F. is for Francis. He worked in a stockroom and figured he had a chance, and he did, as John F. Kennedy. In 1960, he ran for governor. Six John Kennedys were candidates in the state that year. I voted for one of them, in part for the reason many blacks voted for Barack Obama. I did not vote for the other John F. Kennedy, whose political career ended that year.

tjl says:
June 14, 2010 at 1:01 pm
In sum: Republicans aren’t smart enough to pull off something like this.

I made myself a promise a LONG time ago that I would always seek to know the truth. In my years I have found that the truth does not always console me. TJL’s comments present such a case. He is correct in his remarks. It is also true that the Republicans could not nominate a candidate or construct a viable platform that met the approval of the voters in 2008. In short, the Democrats did not win the White House, the Republicans lost it!

Finally, the Tea Party represents the disenfranchised people of this country and their numbers are greater than anyone can imagine. Has the time for the emergence of a new party come? I can only speak for myself and I say that I am not a Democrat or a Republican.

On the “powerline” web site, someone made a coment about “Etheridge the Unready.” That’s an allusion to a well-known anecdote of ancient British history, that of a Saxon king, nicknamed, “Ethelred the Unready,” and also, “Ethelred the Redeless,” because he was never ready to fight the Danish invaders, but just paid them to go away.

It reminds me ot the time, many years ago, when a reporter from the “Kansas City Star” wrote that I was, “Not snobbish, just ethereal.”

I’m sympathetic toward Alvin Greene, who is the underdog.

I figure this is a test run to ensure that the voting machine rigging is going to work just fine come November. I laugh when I hear how American voters actually think they have some say in who runs their country, and how it is run.

The US system is now about as clean as the Soviet election commission before the iron Curtain fell, and the voters have about as much choice.

You can get his campaign shirts if you search his name on ebay if you’re interested.