The differences between absentee in person electronic voting and absentee paper mail-in voting are similarly dramatic:
In Spartanburg County, Alvin Greene won the absentee in-person electronic vote 62% to 38% but Vic Rawl prevailed in the mail-in paper ballots by 72% to 28%;
In Jasper County, Alvin Greene won the absentee in-person electronic vote 56% to 44% but Vic Rawl prevailed in the mail-in paper ballots by 76% to 24%;
In Orangeburg County, Alvin Greene won the absentee in-person electronic vote 52% to 48% but Vic Rawl prevailed in the mail-in paper ballots by 72% to 28%
In Chester County, Alvin Greene won the absentee in-person electronic vote 71% to 29% but Vic Rawl prevailed in the mail-in paper ballots by 55% to 45%;
In Coleton County, Alvin Greene won the absentee in-person electronic vote 58% to 42% but Vic Rawl prevailed in the mail-in paper ballots by 70% to 33%;
In Berkeley County, Alvin Greene won the absentee in-person electronic vote 59% to 41% but Vic Rawl prevailed in the mail-in paper ballots by 73% to 27%;
A spreadsheet on the www.voterga.org home page illustrates the discrepancies so that you can review them and make your own decision about the validity of this South Carolina election. However, the spreadsheet still does not take into account the extraordinary differences in the campaigns that were conducted. 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 tern 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.
Vic Rawl understood this and filed an election protest to have his claims heard by the leadership of the South Carolina Democratic Party on June 17. Expert witnesses testified as to the improbability of such results and they methodically eliminated other false explanations for the discrepancies such as ballot positioning, republican crossover voting and racial preferences. None of those excuses would explain the vast difference in absentee paper ballot results and electronic voting results. In addition, the office manager identified reports she had received from voters in a dozen different counties all of whom were impeded in some way from voting for Vic Rawl. One witness testified that Mr. Rawl was not on the ballot. Another witness testified that she successfully selected Vic Rawl in the race but Alvin Greene's name on the confirmation screen. Still another witness testified that she received a confirmation screen indicating she had voted for Alvin Greene before she voted in the U.S. Senate race and immediately after she cast her vote in the governor's race. Alvin Greene was not present and no evidence was presented to argue that the results were correct, the leadership denied Mr. Rawl's request for new election by a count of 38-7. The entire hearing can be seen just by searching for Vic Rawl on Vimeo.com thanks to John Fortuin and Defenders of Democracy.
The hearing revealed that Vic Rawl's expert witness was denied access to the machines at the county level. In addition, the State Elections Commission denied a petition by State Senator Phil Leventis to impound the machines until they could be checked. The commission claimed that they needed the machines for the run-off. However, they would not have needed all of the machines for the run-of and they would not have needed to impound all of them to run statistically significant tests. A spokesperson for the State Elections Commission said that they have done all that they could do in terms of testing and that they are confident in the results. The commission also issued a statement asserting that the voting machines have always performed accurately and reliably, a claim that is technically impossible to establish since there is no way to independently audit the voting recording mechanism of the machine.
So how should this dilemma be resolved to the satisfaction of all parties? Here is a suggested solution that might satisfy all parties involved:
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