Alvin Greene « BartBlog

July 19, 2010

New Evidence Proves Alvin Greene’s SC Senate Nomination Was Stolen

Filed under: Commentary,News — Tags: Alvin Greene, Big Media, Democrats, Election Theft, ES&S, Garland Favorito, GOP, GOP Sex Scandal, Jim DeMint, Mark Sanford, Republican Scam, South Carolina, Vic Rawl, Vote Fraud — RS Janes @ 3:29 am

You don’t have to know much about South Carolina to know that, except for certain areas, the Republican Party owns the state, including the no-paper-trail ES&S voting machines that made Greene the winner. As Garland Favorito notes in “New Evidence That Alvin Greene’s ‘Win’ in SC Was Stolen!”:

“As you may already know Alvin Greene, an unemployed former military veteran who paid a $10,000 qualifying fee, did not even run a campaign. Greene held no fundraisers, ran no paid advertisements, made no campaign speeches, hired no campaign manager, conducted no state wide tours, attended no Democratic Party county events, printed no yard signs and did not even establish a web site. Vic Rawl, a county commissioner, former judge and four-term state representative, ran a normal, aggressive campaign as his campaign manager, Walter Ludwig, has explained. He personally campaigned in at least half of the counties made radio and TV appearances, attended the state convention, collected official endorsements, had 600 volunteers, printed 10,000 bumper stickers, established 180,000 database contacts, created a 104,000 Email distribution list, had 3,300 Facebook Friends, sent out 300,000 Emails just prior to the election, received 20,000 web site hits on Election Day alone and was more active on Twitter than the other Democratic Party candidates.

“So how did this happen? All South Carolina elections are conducted on statewide unverifiable electronic voting equipment manufactured by Election Systems & Software (ES&S). South Carolina’s voting machines have no independent audit trail of each vote cast. This is necessary to audit the accuracy of the vote recording mechanism that transfers the selections the voter sees on the screen to the vote storage areas. All precinct printouts, ballot images and any other forms of paper documents that can be printed are not created independently but produced internally from the machines after the vote was recorded and could have been corrupted. It is technically impossible for anyone in the state to claim that South Carolina’s Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines record accurately on Election Day since there is no mechanism such as a Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) to independently audit the vote recording. No amount of pre-election testing can assure DRE recording accuracy. The Federal Election Assistance Commission’s (EAC) Technical Guidelines Development Committee concluded that: “The National Institute of Standards and Testing & EAC Security & Transparency Subcommittee do not know how to write testable requirements to satisfy that the software in a DRE is correct” The reason for such a conclusion is that many electronic voting machines, such as those used in South Carolina, can be programmed in a variety of ways to count differently on Election Day than during testing. As a result, South Carolina voters cannot verify that the selections they see on the screen were electronically recorded, election officials cannot audit the actual vote counts and there is no directly created evidence of voter intent that can be used in a recount.”

So, while Vic Rawl won handily in certified mail-in absentee paper ballots by a 55 to 45 percent margin, the easily hacked and unverfiable ES&S equipment gave the hapless GOP plant Greene a 60 percent landslide. The probability of this happening is on the order of winning the Power Ball lottery 10 times in a row. As Favorito writes elsewhere in the article:

“Alvin Greene was declared the winner based on a near landslide 60-40% margin in Election Day electronic voting results. However, certified mail-in paper ballot results, received from the counties after a 15-business-day response period allowed under South Carolina law, show that Vic Rawl actually won the verifiable mail-in paper ballot absentee voting by a solid 55-45% margin.”

(Read the article and a detailed breakdown of the numbers here.)

Sen. Jim DeMint and the SC GOP must be mighty afraid, following the Gov. Mark Sanford sex scandal and the other Republican disasters, to pull a stunt like this.

It’s also interesting how uncurious our Big Media is over this obvious election theft. Will this new evidence bring them around?

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June 14, 2010

The Tattlesnake — The Alvin Greene Fraud (and More) Edition

Filed under: Commentary,Opinion — Tags: Alvin Greene, Big Media, Democrats, GOP, Gregory Brown, Jim Clyburn, Jim DeMint, Jim Wilson, Preston Grisham, Pundits, RS Janes, SC, scam, Tattlesnake, TPMMuckraker, US Senate, Voter Fraud — RS Janes @ 6:20 am

Just How Stupid Are South Carolina Republicans?

“I’m the Democratic Party nominee. I mean, I mean, the people have spoken. The people of South Carolina have spoken. The people of South Carolina have spoken. We have to be pro-South Carolina. The people of South Carolina have spoken. We have to be pro-South Carolina.”
– Alvin Greene, apparently accepting the Dem nomination for US Senate from South Carolina, as quoted by CommonDreams.org.

Did the South Carolina GOP really think they could sneak this poor hapless vet through without anyone noticing? Regardless of what the Bias-Belted Insider Punditocracy says, I think the SC GOP, including cynical rump-pimple Sen. Jim DeMint, are a lot more vulnerable than the Big Media Babblelonians realize. It’s the only reason the GOP dirty tricksters would try a lame stunt like this – what with the aftermath of the Mark Sanford scandal and the Republican-run state cratering economically mired in record unemployment, they’re getting desperate.

Sadly, 13-year military veteran Greene resembles an advanced PTSD case in the way he speaks and acts. He may also have a drinking or drug problem that needs servicing. Such people are easy to hornswoggle for money into buffoonish charades such as this. If the SC Republicans abused a brain-damaged vet this way, they should be boiled in BP’s Gulf oil. (They should anyway, but that’s another story.)

It shouldn’t be too hard to find out how an unemployed man who had declared himself indigent a couple of months ago came up with $10,400 to put his name on the ballot, didn’t spend a dime for anything else in his ‘campaign’ (even his t-shirt reads ‘Greene Family Reunion,’ although he wears it as if it had something to do with his senate run), and somehow won against an experienced former judge and state legislator, Vic Rawls, who actually went out and campaigned across the state. (Maybe it has to do with the fact that in SC Republicans can vote for Dem primary candidates, or the state’s easily-hacked, no-paper-trail touch screen voting equipment manufactured and installed by GOP-friendly companies.) This stinks of blatant election fraud and it would seem easy to prosecute the seamy GOP lowlife that is surely behind it.

Not only that, but SC Rep. Jim Clyburn’s Democratic primary opponent, a shit-grinning ‘bidnessman’ named Gregory Brown, supposedly spent $70K to challenge incumbent Clyburn. Curiously, more than a third of that money was paid for ‘marketing strategies’ to a firm owned by Preston Grisham, who worked as a special assistant and campaign manager for Republican Rep. Joe “You Lie!” Wilson up until November of 2009, and was flacking for two SC Republican candidates at the same time he was being paid by Brown. Move along, nothing to see here, stop connecting those dots.

Perhaps this is to be expected in a state that spawned the late Lee Atwater and his nasty and devious approach to political campaigning, but certainly Eric Holder’s DOJ can take action to charge those responsible for such obvious, and stupid, attempts at defrauding South Carolina voters – these were elections for federal office, after all.

“Clyburn’s Dem Challenger Denies He’s A ‘Plant’ — But Hired GOP Rep.’s Aide”
– Christina Bellatoni and Justin Elliot, TPMMuckraker, June 11, 2010.

“Clyburn Alleges Conspiracy To Plant Candidates In Three Dem Primaries In S.C.”
– Christina Bellatoni, TPMMuckraker, June 10, 2010.

“The Alvin Greene Interviews; a TPMtv Original Video”

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June 13, 2010

The Greene Miracle Needs an Explanation

Filed under: Commentary — Tags: Alvin Greene, Astrology, Upsets — Bob Patterson @ 4:53 pm

For the conspiracy theory lunatics who believe that the Republicans use the (no paper trail) electronic voting machines to micromanage election results, explaining the miracle of Alvin Greene’s successful effort to become the Democratic Party’s nominee to run for the Senate from South Carolina was a routine “see we tried to warn you” variation of a fill in the blanks report from the “business as usual” file. No mystery for them. The expected winner, Vic Rawl, has called for an investigation of the results, according to Fox News.

For the mainstream media, where calmer heads prevail, it was a bit more of a challenge. Luckily someone (a Republican strategist with prepackaged spin at the ready?) came up with the explanation that since Greene came before the favorite on the alphabetically listed ballot, a tendency to pick the first name voters see (and this theory was based on what reputable scholarly research?) was offered to explain the Greene miracle.

That explanation was assumed to be not just good enough to explain the victory but also how the fellow got 60% of the vote. Did the explainers give three examples of that happening previously in South Carolina? Is it a well known political phenomenon and therefore not in need of any substantiation by the fact checkers working for media that relayed this bullshit with a straight face? Wait, if it’s Republican spin you don’t have to waste money on the fact checking process. Just send the hand-out to the typesetters with a staff generated headline.

Can anyone name one expert or study that substantiates the idea that alphabetical order could produce a lopsided election win of that magnitude?

The liberal media was only too happy to “report” the “alphabetical order” explanation because it relied on the cliché image of a dumb Southern shitkicker as voter and it also assumed that even college educated Americans in other sections of the country would accept the absurd explanation with out question or hesitation. And they did.

In the Preface to his1995 book “20 Years of Censored News,” Carl Jensen wrote: “Indeed the media-generated myth of the press as an aggressive, unbiased, honest watchdog of society is just that – a myth.”

Does anyone honestly believe that the alphabetical order crap explains a 60% of the vote win? If he really got that much of the vote, shouldn’t Democrats be planning how to help the guy beat his opponent rather than trying to get him replaced on the ballot? Doesn’t the Democrats’ “he doesn’t deserve the victory” attitude smack of elitism? Isn’t elitism “so yesterday”?

A vast number of red blooded patriotic Americans have believed that Bush was fairly elected twice, he didn’t know that there were no WMD’s, Gestapo questioning methods are OK if Americans use them, and a compassionate Christian conservative says “Tough shit” when folks’ unemployment checks are held up by budgetary concerns; so the alphabetical order explanation is not much of a stretch for them.

Many Americans also believe that it’s not right for a politician to lie about his military service, but if it’s a member of the Bush family and their military records vanish, that is OK.

Democrats, while Bush was serving as President, thought that Republicans were funding war crimes but now they won’t let their opinion of the Republicans even consider the possibility that GOP would manipulate voting results if they could. That’s too low even for Republicans. Heck, not even the Nazis tampered with election results . . . or did they?

Here’s another genius idea: did any of the big news organizations think to have an astrologer examine the results? Wouldn’t an astrologer’s pronouncement carry just as much gravitas as the expert opinion about the alphabetical order explanation? Who exactly was the source for that theory? Isn’t it just a theory until someone provides proof? Was the expert who came up with the goofy explanation the same expert who declared infallibly that Howard Dean had suffered a complete mental breakdown when he celebrated a primary elections victory?

When Democrats say something, reporters have to run out and get a college professor to confirm or deny the claim, but when it comes time to evaluate Republican spin, the reporters will just use a professorial tone of voice and let it go at face value.

Does anybody still believe in the old Jimmy Stewart movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”? The Teabaggers have tapped into the populist philosophy, but when the Democrats see a Horatio Alger style political victory, they don’t seem to really believe in the idea of an “against all odds idealist.” Wouldn’t St. Reagan find that a worth target for his Irish wit? Wouldn’t the Republican self made successes find this lack of faith in an individual’s efforts ludicrous?

Has anybody noticed how “explanations” inevitably lead to charges of lunatic ideas in action, and “unexplained phenomenon” is an almost weekly occurrence in the national news broadcasts? “Nothing to see here, move along!” (Time again to plug Ross Thomas’ book: “The fools in town are on our side!” just for the title.)

We don’t intend that this should be a CT column but where are the South Carolina Democrats’ astrological charts? Isn’t it time to demand that they be produced and made public?

The Washington Post attempted to elaborate all possible explanations, but they didn’t touch the astrological charts. See this:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/senate/explaining-alvin-greene.html?wprss=thefix

In his autobiography, famous con man Frank Abagnale wrote: “Almost any fault, sin, or crime is considered more leniently if there’s a touch of class involved.” Doesn’t the Greene Miracle have “class” written all over it? Or is that Karl Rove’s autograph?

Now, the disk jockey will play “The Chipmunks Song” (“ALVIN! ! !”), Al Green’s hit “Here I am (Come and Take Me), and “You Sexy Thing.” We gotta go over to the Cafepress website and start selling our trademarked “Senator Greene for President” t-shirts. Have a “Catch Me If You Can” type week.

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