The Curious Case of Alvin Greene

[Sam Spade]

Honestly, interfering in the other side's primary is done all the time.  Hell, I may have done it.  But there is a big difference between legal and illegal.    

Of course. 

But show me the federal statute that says said action is illegal.  What are the elements?  What is the standard of proof?  What are the parties who can be implicated in such actions and what are the circumstances that catches them within the meaning of the statute?  Build me a case, because otherwise accusations of illegality are baseless.

Oh and btw, lawyers struggle for their money.  Anyone who actually works and take responsibility struggles for the money which is why folks around here have such a positive view of government jobs.

[Lunar]

But show me the federal statute that says said action is illegal.  What are the elements?  What is the standard of proof?  What are the parties who can be implicated in such actions and what are the circumstances that catches them within the meaning of the statute?  Build me a case, because otherwise accusations of illegality are baseless.

I'm not an expert on campaign finance law, and Citizens United may have changed this, but my understanding is that Independent Expenditure efforts need to properly file as an IE organizations and follow federal rules when they play in federal races.  Look at Harry Reid's group, the one that ran anti-Lowden ads, as an example of this,.

I'm not going to build you a legal case here, as I'm not qualified to do so, all I can do is use my experience and background to make conjectures, which I freely do as we know.  I've built a fairly solid [non-lawyer] case that Greene either lied to the courts when he proved he qualified for a public defender a couple months ago, or that his filing to get ballot access was funded by an illegal campaign contribution -- as for such a filing to be legal, it would need five separate $2,300 contributions for the "Al Greene for Senate" organization to legally possess the $10,400 he spent for ballot access.  As he insists that the $10,400 which he spent was entirely his own money, and all the evidence says that he could not have possessed that money legitimately, and his own actions of not campaigning after spending that sum, there's a fairly strong case of something illegal going on here.  

And, it should be said, there's still a serious possibility that a Democratic operative could be behind this.  As I said earlier, you don't appear on the ballot unless you have an opponent, so for any challenger, there's a serious incentive to have a challenger to build name recognition.  

[JohnnyLongtorso]

This whole situation is beyond bizarre. Even if this guy is a Republican plant (which I would not be surprised to learn is true), all it really means is that DeMint will win by 35 points now instead of 25 points. Is he that paranoid about winning re-election that he would orchestrate something like this?

[Lunar]

This whole situation is beyond bizarre. Even if this guy is a Republican plant (which I would not be surprised to learn is true), all it really means is that DeMint will win by 35 points now instead of 25 points. Is he that paranoid about winning re-election that he would orchestrate something like this?

I really doubt that DeMint himself is behind this, obviously for him to orchestrate picking his opponent (Like Reid did, but legally through an IE effort) is far more risky than it's worth not orchestrating that, and DeMint is a fairly smart guy, politically.

As similar cases to Greene's happened in some Congressional races, it was probably just a generic SC GOP operative screwing things around.  Why?  It's election year, there's money available, and somebody thought they'd play around with it.  

I mean...why do you think DeMint has $4 million buckaroos in the bank?  Because thousands of donors though that they would make a difference in a competitive race?  No, political operatives act like political operatives no matter where they are, and if there's no reason to screw around with things, they will do so anyway, especially the South Carolina GOP, probably the shadiest political organization this side of North Korea.

[Torie]

Honestly, interfering in the other side's primary is done all the time.  Hell, I may have done it.  But there is a big difference between legal and illegal.    

Of course.  

But show me the federal statute that says said action is illegal.  What are the elements?  What is the standard of proof?  What are the parties who can be implicated in such actions and what are the circumstances that catches them within the meaning of the statute?  Build me a case, because otherwise accusations of illegality are baseless.

Oh and btw, lawyers struggle for their money.  Anyone who actually works and take responsibility struggles for the money which is why folks around here have such a positive view of government jobs.

I just composed quite a long post, about my thoughts of being a lawyer, the ups and downs, the stresses, the responsibility, the demands on yourself, if you demand of yourself a very high quality of performance (and that is the key really), the periods of time when you work almost every waking moment (sometimes for months on end) struggling with tough, close, complex issues, which involve judgment calls on which very large amounts of money can be riding, the sometimes hideous complex financial formulas one must get just right, on which large amounts of money may be at stake, forcing clients to think about contingencies that they think will never happen (hey we will all just get along, we are friends), and paying me thousands to draft the legal mechanics to deal with such contingencies that they think will never happen, disciplining clients to get over their emotions and anger, or greed, or impulse to dishonesty, or hiding the ball in some transactional deal, where the hiding ultimately may win them the battle but lose the war (I sometimes have to give almost therapeutic lectures about that), and having the moxie to do it without fear,  and with self confidence, and getting them to the point where they almost enjoy being bitch slapped by their lawyer, and just how long it takes I think to really become worth a damn, but I accidentally erased it all, so that is that.

But you know what? Over the decades, you end up with the clients who you really want, who really trust you, and are used to your style, and over time, have come to understand that it is to their benefit. You become friends. And that much at least is really satisfying. And now, it is hard to really retire, as long as I think some of those clients really need me, and want me.

Anyway, good luck Sam.

CC: Bullmoose, Badger

[Lunar]

Also, Sam, the moment that there's enough publicly available information that something illegal happened, Clyburn's friends are going to launch a lawsuit.  So sit tight.  Obviously there's not such information yet, or if there is, someone more informed than myself will need to connect the dots.

All I can do is connect half he dots and see that the shape looks like a rotting fish. 

[Lunar]

And, it should be said, there's still a serious possibility that a Democratic operative could be behind this.  As I said earlier, you don't appear on the ballot unless you have an opponent, so for any challenger, there's a serious incentive to have a challenger to build name recognition.  

Additional thought: If this turns out to be the case, operatives need to make sure that their plant is on board with the party for Plan B, the freak case where their no-name plant for primary politics, ends up winning.

You'd think a felony case of distributing pornographic materials becoming national news would be enough of an incentive, but whatever bribe this guy took to appear on the ballot, if it did indeed come from Dems, didn't come with the "P.S. Oh yeah, if you win, please drop out" clause at the bottom.  

It should be said though, at least Alvin Greene is being more honest about his military record than Mark Kirk -- as Greene has publicly said from the start that his honorable discharge was involuntary. 

[Fmr. Pres. Duke]

How did you all know I was sending direct mail pamphlets on Greene's behalf with my own money?

[Eraserhead]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYtnrvn9xd4&feature=player_embedded#!

[jimrtex]

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/38433.html#ixzz0qZXV3RTm

In Lancaster County, Rawl won absentee ballots over Greene by a staggering 84 percent to 16 percent margin; but Greene easily led among Election Day voters by 17 percentage points.

Curiously, 4% of Republican votes were absentee; but 27% of Democratic votes were.

The anomaly here is actually the number of Democratic absentee ballots in Lancaster County and how strongly they went for Rawl.

If you look at the neighboring counties of Chesterfield, Kershaw, and Chester, absentee ballots for Democrats were 7. 10, and 9%, and 2, 10, and 5% for Republicans, respectively.  So there were slightly larger share of Democratic absentees.  But given the relative interest level, this probably indicates more election day Republicans.

Absentee percentage for Greene: 60, 52, 56, and 16 (Chesterfield, Kershaw, Chester, Lancaster)

Election day percentage for Greene: 61, 57, 61, 59

So it is the absentee Democratic voting in Lancaster that is out of line, both in share of absentee votes and how strongly it went for Rawl.

In Spartanburg County, Ludwig said there are 25 precincts in which Greene received more votes than were actually cast and 50 other precincts where votes appeared to be missing from the final count.

“In only two of 88 precincts, do the number of votes Greene got plus the number we got equal the total cast,” Ludwig said.

Spartanburg County has 98 precincts.

There were 9 precincts where the total of Greene and Rawl voters equaled votes cast, but that was because only about 90.1% of voters voted in the Senate race, compared with 98.7% in the Democratic governor's race (which was visibly contested) and 99.7% of the vote in the GOP governor's race (86% of Spartanburg County voters voted in the GOP primary - voters pick a party at the polling place).  The precincts where there were no Dem senate abstentions were very low turnout precincts (If 10 voters are independently 90% likely to vote in a race, 34% of the time all 10 will vote).

I don't see any precincts where Greene got more votes than were cast.  The precincts where Rawl defeated Greene were pretty strong Republican (85-95%).  The precincts where more Democrats voted than Republicans - and presumably Black were slightly more favorable to Greene, but not sharply.

Overall, the results are pretty consistent with a very low information race, where most of the media attention would have been on the GOP governor's race (and lots of other races including congressional races such as Bob Inglis, and a 9-candidate race in Charleston with Strom Thurmond's son and a Black Republican).

There was a contested Democratic governor's race, and the two white candidates were from 2 of the counties where Rawl did slightly better.  And Rawl did better around Charleston and  Columbia.

In 18 counties, Greene ran 5% better than his statewide average
10 were 2 to 5% better.
8 counties were near to the statewide avearge.
2 were slightly more favorable to Rawl.
8 were 5% better for Rawl than his statewide average.

So Greene generally did better in more rural areas, where it is likely there was less news.  He did especially well along the Georgia border - which might get their TV from Augusta and might give superficial coverage to SC; and the eastern corner, where Florence stations might have a weak signal and weak news content, so that people depend on cable or satellite.

[minionofmidas]

So a bunch of Republican like AHDuke voted for the guy?  I mean just because you are a GOP plant, does not mean you win a Dem nomination for a statewide office. But hey, if it works in SC, maybe it should be tried in my state.

No, no, my point was that the race was even more low-turnout because informed voters would want to vote in the GOP primary.  

So you agree it was a low information primary day voter thing that was the explanation of the chap getting so many votes (as a percentage since you are saying few voted in the Dem primary relatively speaking) on that day?  

Besides, it may have been the same thing as in the PA-4 Rep primary - one known but unliked person, one perfect unknown, a general anti-incumbency mood, and voters use it as a referendum on the known person.
Who loses.

However he got on the ballot... he won the election. Just drop it. Ballot access is far too restrictive anyways.
Besides, I'd probably vote for him over most career politicians.

[jimrtex]

Is this all a function of uber low information primary day voters? I mean the suggestion that there was massive ballot tampering in SC just doesn't seem very believable.

His support was reasonably consistent across the state, and generally strongest in rural areas, with a slight but not overwhelming bias toward areas with a larger black percentage.  But it probably isn't really reliable to base this on share of the population, rather than share of the primary electorate.  In some areas, like Greenville and Spartanburg, around 85% of the turnout was in the Republican Primary.  So even there, the Democratic primary might have been strongly black.

Greene had 5% better support than his statewide support in more counties than Rawl was at his strongest.  So Greene did better in rural areas.  He did especially well along the Georgia border, some of which is in the Augusta TV area, and in the Florence area in eastern SC, which is a smallish market.   These areas probably have weaker local news reporting, since anyone with talent is going to move to a larger market, and they might have weaker TV signals so more people rely on cable or satellite and do without local news.

The areas where Rawl did better in areas with a significant black population were scattered.

Orangeburg (south of Columbia) and Jasper (in the southern tip across from Savannah) had Democratic primary elections for legislative races, which I'm presuming would be decisive.  Democrats were 90% of the turnout in Jasper, and 65% in Orangeburg.  So it could be that there was a strong GOTV effort in those areas.  In other areas it could be more a matter of persons being vaguely aware that there was election day, but being so unaware that they would choose a Democratic ballot (South Carolina doesn't have party registration, so voters can choose a party on election day).  Rawl also did better around Charleston and Columbia, which may have had a little bit of news coverage of the senate race.  Rawl is from Charleston and was a legislator at one time, but I don't think recently.  Columbia is the state capital and also University of South Carolina, so there is probably more political awareness. 

Another strong Rawl county was Lancaster (on the NC border south of Charlotte).  But it had a really high volume absentee turnout (27% of Democratic vote which went 84% for Rawl), and only 4% Republican absentee.  But the election day support for Greene was very similar to neighboring counties, and in the neighboring counties absentee support for Greene was just a few percentage points lower than on election day, and absentee ballots were under 10% of the vote.

Presumably, absentee voters are a little bit better informed, since some election day votes will be more on impulse.  So absentee voting for Rawl in Lancaster looks suspicious.  It is the Rawl vote that is out of line, not the Greene vote.

The vote share for Greene was reasonably consistent across the state and even within counties.  So if you were flipping votes you would have to be doing it in 100s of precincts.  So unless someone planted a "Greene" hack in the firmware and if SC has bought its voting machines statewide, not too likely.

As for a well-targeted direct mail campaign.  Around 7% of registered voters voted in the Democratic Primary (17% in the Republican). 

So you can pick 2% of the population and have 100% success rate in getting them to vote for your guy.  That is either exquisite targeting or extremely convincing literature.  I think 1000s of voters walking into polling places with arms rigidly in front, saying repeatedly, "Must vote for Alvin Greene ..." would be noticed.

Or you can target 10% and have 20% success in getting them to the polls for your guy.  And if you can target 10% and not have anyone tumble across the mail-out to 250,000 voters, you also deserve to win.

So I vote for general cluelessness, in a very low turnout election for a down ballot race (SC puts federal elections below state elections), with perhaps blacks more likely to vote for the blacker sounding name - when I read Vic Rawl, I think "Lou Rawls".  Of the two Green congressmen from Houston, one is black and one is white.  I did read one comment by the black candidate for governor, who said that former slaves didn't know how to spell and added an "e" to the end of the name.  And that Green's are white, and Greene's are black.  I don't know if that is true or not.  Nathanael Greene, for whom Greene County in 16 states was named for (Kentucky and Wisconsin dropped the final 'e') was white.

The news reports are now saying that he was a 2000 Political Science graduate from University of South Carolina.  His spoken vocabulary and pronunciation suggest that it is possible.  He is somewhat reminiscent of a stutterer.

He is 32 and lives with his father who is 81 years old and has had kidney dialysis and has a heart attack.  He lives in a small town of I-95 in the eastern part of the state.  So I don't think it is unusual to be living with a parent at all, especially if you don't have a job.

He has been in both the AF and the Army, and was discharged involuntarily, though perhaps not dishonorably from the Army in 2009.

The disseminating obscenity charge happened in a computer lab in a dorm at USC, when he sat down next to a coed, and started talking about football, and then showed her some porn on his computer screen, and then suggested they go up to her dorm room.  He may be in some sort of his diversion program.  The lab was in a card access area, and it doesn't sound like he has any current student standing.

[minionofmidas]

It is perfectly normal for surnames to carry older spellings with slightly more letters. These are, usually, the commoner forms. A non-English speaking immigrant who changed his name to Green sometime around 1900, OTOH (for example as an abbreviated anglicized form of a German or Yiddish name), would likely use the modern spelling. If "Green" is more white than "Greene" it is far more likely to be due to that - all the most common English names are statistically fairly "Black" in the US, some with Black majorities.

[ilikeverin]

In the 1930 census, I have "Green" being 66.0% white, while "Greene" is 79.3% white.  Obviously, there are big caveats on this (namely, that the census had names written down by enumerators, who often didn't ask for spellings of names... woe upon those who were illiterate ), but... at least it's data rather than anecdote.

[Torie]

In the 2000 census, Green was 36% black, and Greene was 25% black.

[minionofmidas]

By 2000, Green was 59.3% Non-Hispanic White Only, 36.2% Non-hispanic Black Only; while Greene is 70.3% White, 25.5% Black. You see, I can check data sources too! Also, Green is apparently almost four times as common as Greene, and is the 37th most common name in the US while Greene is 228th.

The "blackest" names in 2000, out of those in the top 1000 nationwide (which rules out any African immigrant names) were
Washington 89.9, Jefferson 75.2, Booker 65.6, Banks 54.2, Jackson (the 18th most common name in America) 53.0, Mosley 52.8, Dorsey 51.8, Gaines 50.3, Rivers 50.2, and Joseph 48.8% non-hispanic Black.

EDIT: Damn you Torie. Overlooked your post.

[Torie]

In other news, PPP per its own analysis says the Greene thing was a "completely random" event, so it is time to move on folks. It's been fun.

[ilikeverin]

Oh, I wasn't doing the "can has sources" thing as a slight against anyone in the thread, I was just annoyed by a lot of the airheaded punditry being spouted on the news.  I didn't even know the census bureau had current statistics on last names and race.  ¡Sorpresa!

[useful idiot]

I hadn't realized or heard before that he was "the first major-party African-American U.S. Senate candidate in South Carolina since Reconstruction". I went on the wikipedia page for the election and nearly died laughing when I saw that.

[minionofmidas]

And to think that the state was Black majority for much of that period...

[King]

The two most famous Al Greens in the history of the Wikipedia are both black, if that means anything:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Green

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Green_%28Texas%29

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Seek help.


Moving right along, what is illegal about AHDuke (as it were) sending out a mailer for Greene with his own money?

Although the closest on the this forum probably, I highly doubt AHDuke is anything at all like the kind of the Republicans typifying the GOP State Party Leadership and operatives.

[Torie]

AHDuke knew I was just using him as a prop. Of course he would go nowhere near any of this - ever. Hey, he wants to be a lawyer, and in my opinion, he was the potential to be an excellent one, and that means among other things, being an ethical one. Enough said.

[Eraserhead]

More lulzy interviews plz

[jimrtex]

In the 1930 census, I have "Green" being 66.0% white, while "Greene" is 79.3% white.  Obviously, there are big caveats on this (namely, that the census had names written down by enumerators, who often didn't ask for spellings of names... woe upon those who were illiterate ), but... at least it's data rather than anecdote.

Is this for South Carolina or the US?

There could be big regional differences.  If there is a large slave plantation like you had in South Carolina, then it would be like some Mormon polygamist with dozens of "children" who have his surname.

I think that Greene would be a favored spelling in South Carolina (and perhaps much of the US, because of Nathanael Greene, who was head of American forces in the south during the Revolution.

There are counties named for Greene in NY, PA, VA, NC, GA, AL, MS, AR, TN, KY, OH, IN, IL, WI, MO, and IA.  Practically every state that had any counties to be named after someone, up through about the mid 19th century named a county for him.  Greenville, South Carolina and Greensboro, NC are both named for him.

So if you weren't sure how your name was spelled, you might be more likely to choose Greene, if that is the way it was spelled in your history books.