That South Carolina election? Strangeness abounds.

[thewayne]

A guy named Greene, a total political unknown, won the "South Carolina Democratic primary despite being broke, unemployed, holding no campaign appearances or rallies, and having raised no money. No one knew who the guy was, basically, until after the election happened... which is certainly quite strange. Also, once the news came out and the press scrambled to figure out who the hell this guy was, it came out that he's facing felony charges for obscenity."

Two interesting things. First, South Carolina uses ES&S electronic voting machines, which have known major security problems and no audit trail. Second, using statistical analysis, apparently the voting numbers don't stand up to analysis.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/06/sc-democratic-primary-getting-weirder.html

http://techdirt.com/articles/20100609/1616099761.shtml

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/06/15/024231/The-South-Carolina-Primary-and-Voting-Machine-Fraud

Comments

[silveradept]

I don't know if we'll know what happened, but it makes for some interesting speculation.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Guaranteed it's going to be a VERY closely watched race in November, assuming he's still running at that point. The arrested for porn charges makes this even more weird.

[silveradept]

It does, indeed. It feels all wrong, but hopefully it turns out all right.Maybe we'll be able to replicate that success and start sneaking ordinary people into political races with no traces of the meddling.