FiveThirtyEight.com: "Stunning" and "Strange" Numbers in SC for Greene

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/06/something-fishy-in-south-carolina.html

Is there something suspicious about the results in the US Senate primary victory of unknown Democrat Alvin Greene, who defeated fellow Democrat Vic Rawl, 59 percent to 41 percent? I'm not sure yet, but there is a whiff of something strange going on here.

As many of you probably know already, Greene is a candidate who seems to have mysteriously come out of nowhere to win--and rather comfortably at that--despite having not even so much as a campaign website...

-snip

I don't have anything to say, at least not yet, about the anticipated v. actual turnout on Tuesday. But what I went ahead and did on my own was a quick, county-level analysis of the Greene-Rawl vote, comparing Greene's share of the two-candidate vote (i.e., Greene/Greene+Rawl) in each county with the non-white share of registrants countywide. (Both sets of data were taken from SC's State Election Committee.) I then plotted these two percentages against each other in the figure above.

What's stunning is that there simply is no relationship between the race of a county's registrants and Greene's performance in that county.# To be clear, there is a significant enough range in the non-white registrant share--from a low of 8.3 percent in Pickens County to a high of 75.8 percent in Allendale County--as well as in Greene's county-wide performance, from a low of 45.7 percent in Charleston County to a high 74.4 percent in Greenwood County. And yet the slope is as almost as close to zero as you can get...

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/06/something-fishy-in-south-carolina.html">Tons more including fancy graphs here... :)

K&R

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

SC Democratic Primary Getting Weirder By The Hour

...As regular 538 readers know, our otherwise soft-spoken leader Nate Silver carries a big statistical stick and used it earlier this year to cudgel Strategic Vision polling firm by showing that their results had unusual digit patterns which strongly suggest the results were simply made up. Similarly, the Rawl campaign has now issued a press release reporting the findings of separate inquiries performed by two respected electoral forensics experts, Dr. Walter Mebane of the UMichigan and Dr. Michael Miller of Cornell, neither of whom is affiliated with the campaign...

Dr. Mebane performed second-digit Benford's law tests on the precinct returns from the Senate race. The test compares the second digit of actual precinct vote totals to a known numeric distribution of data that results from election returns collected under normal conditions. If votes are added or subtracted from a candidate’s total, possibly due to error or fraud, Mebane’s test will detect a deviation from this distribution.

Results from Mebane’s test showed that Rawl’s Election Day vote totals depart from the expected distribution at 90% confidence...

Indeed: An unusual, non-random pattern in the precinct-level results suggests tampering, or at least machine malfunction, perhaps at the highest level. And Mebane is perhaps the leading expert on this very subject. Along with the anomalies between absentee ballot v. election day ballots Miller found, something smells here.

-snip

That leaves what I think are now two scenarios:

A. The first is a combination of the first and second possibilities of my initial post: Greene was a nobody, but Rawl was darn near close to a nobody, and thus Greene's alphabetical ballot position, coupled with whatever signal the spelling of his surname sent to some African Americans that he might be (and in fact is) an African American, with a dash of Rawl's high disapproval among the 18 percent of survey respondents who had heard of him, combined to take what in theory might otherwise have been a 50/50 split among two broadly unknown candidates and turned it instead into a 59/41 race.

B. Somebody with access to software and machines engineered a very devious manipulation of the vote returns--but not so devious that he/she/they were unable to cover the tracks of the digit patterns in those results.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/06/sc-democratic-primary-getting-weirder.html">Read the whole thing, tons more, at 538...

that 538 does not explore is the possibility that Greene did no campaigning, was completely unknown, and had no website. Therefore the voters did not know simply did not know his race, as well as anything else about the man. The fact that there is no correlation between the racial composition of the electorate and the results would make sense if most folks did not know his race.

an 18 point margin of victory. Others have been using racial politics to try and explain that. So this seems to rule that out.

If you're going to commit fraud in an election it seems like you'd fix the results so they at least seem believable. If the race was closer - like 51/49, then so many eyebrows wouldn't be raised over this. This huge margin of victory by a virtually unknown candidate now has national attention.

As far as the names being in alphabetical order - maybe that's how they do it in SC but here in CA the names get mixed up in different order so no one has an edge by virtue of being 1st on the ballot.

If you're going to commit fraud with the intent to win, wouldn't you be doing it on behalf of a somewhat viable candidate, not a blithering idiot?

the fraud. Maybe you don't want a viable candidate to win the primary. Maybe you want someone who will most definitely lose the general.

Still seems weird since I realy didn't think DeMint was in any danger of losing in November. SC is pretty safe for the Republicans.

There is definitely more to this story than meets the eye, but for the life of me I can't figure out what it would be.

there is clearly a piece missing here somewhere, but what and why?

That's why I love this story. :)

but the absence of typical racial voting patterns observed in South Carolina when the race of the candidates is broadly known, may not infer the presence of any conspiracy or vote manipulation in this case.

It could be that the somewhat better known candidate, as from what I am gathering from a distance is that neither of them were household names, to the extent he was known, the knowledge was negative.

Where i live in FL, at one point the local US House seats were so non-competitive and the FL Dems so ineffective, that virtually anyone who was willing to take on a losing cause could run on the party ticket. The name would change every two years but the vote total of around 35 percent would not.

In a sense, it did not matter who got the nod, as they were surely going to lose. Then, in my case, came Alan Grayson.

I saw Greene say on TV that he used his own funds. Anyone that is unemployed ain't gonna throw $10 grand away on a political race, and wouldn't have that kind of money around for long.