“I see dead people… they’re everywhere.” And they’re probably voting in tomorrow’s election. An in-depth look at our shoddy vote-tallying methods can be found here: How To Rig an Election
Of interest. locally, has been the countless emails I’ve received over the years concerning this particular primary:
There is, finally, South Carolina's 2010 race for U.S. Senate, which Republican Jim DeMint won with 78 percent of the vote. What is mysterious is not the ultimate outcome, but the Democratic primary that preceded it, which tossed up a fairly fortuitous opponent for DeMint: Alvin Greene, an unemployed thirty-two-year-old accused sex offender living in his father's basement.
Greene, often described as "incoherent," ran no campaign: no website, no appearances at Democratic events, not even a yard sign. Yet he miraculously beat his opponent in the Democratic primary, former judge and four-term state legislator Vic Rawl, by an 18 percent margin. Voters and campaign workers reported that the ES&S touchscreen machines "flipped" votes to Greene all day long. Meanwhile, the absentee ballots - which were counted by hand - told a different story. In half of the state's forty-six counties, there was a 10 percent disparity between absentee ballots and those counted by machine; in Lancaster County, Rawl won 84 percent of the absentee vote.
Greene denied accusations (or, some would say, observations) that he was a G.O.P. plant, while declining to explain where he got the $10,400 needed to file as a candidate. Rawl lodged a formal protest and requested a new primary. That was quickly knocked down by the executive committee of the South Carolina Democratic Party - and DeMint sailed to a rout in November.
In the weeks following the South Carolina spectacle, the press engaged in round after round of analytic Twister, avoiding the most obvious question: Had another extremist just gained federal office on the basis of a rigged election? Their silence, however, was nothing unusual.
In his 2011 paper "To the American Media: Time to Face the Reality of Election Rigging," Jonathan Simon accuses the press of maintaining a Mafia-style omertà on the subject. "The gruesome truth," he writes, "is that American elections can be rigged, and are being rigged, because the American media treats election rigging as something that - all evidence notwithstanding - could never happen here."
Over the years, I’ve maintained that the primaries are ever so important to our cause. My bad.
