BartBlog

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?