“We Need to be Pro-South Carolina, Not Anti-Greene”
[Guest post by DRJ]
America has its share of eccentric politicians and political stories with South Carolina’s Governor Wanderlust and the drama surrounding Nikki Haley, but Alvin Greene — the surprising Democratic Senate candidate opposing Sen. Jim DeMint — is hard to beat:
“Alvin Greene, 32, didn’t raise any money. He didn’t have a website. And his opponent was a relatively better-known former legislator, Vic Rawl, who was already preparing for the general election.
Greene was considered such a long shot that his opponent and media didn’t even bother to check his background. If they had, they would have discovered he faces a felony obscenity charge after an alleged encounter with a college student last fall.”
Greene says Democrats should support him:
“The Democratic Party has chosen their nominee, and we have to stand behind their choice,” Greene told the AP at his home in Manning. “The people have spoken. We need to be pro-South Carolina, not anti-Greene.”
That really is the quote of the day.
MORE: AP’s story on Greene.
H/T S.
— DRJ
If it weren’t so funny….It’s scary to think we have voters that apparently vote based on alphabetical order.
jkeeb (df1132) — 6/9/2010 @ 4:29 pmJkeeb – in California, ballot order is randomized so as to prevent just that effect.
aphrael (e0cdc9) — 6/9/2010 @ 4:47 pmPerhaps the voters are interested in an established felon…you know…just to prove they can handle the job.
Rookdick (cd6b1d) — 6/9/2010 @ 4:51 pmJust look at any legislative body and you know that felons can handle the job, it’s just that they haven’t been convicted yet.
AD - RtR/OS! (f15c7c) — 6/9/2010 @ 5:03 pmAlvin needs to have a conversation with Scott Lee Cohen here in Illinois.
daleyrocks (1d0d98) — 6/9/2010 @ 5:19 pmI don’t know anything about Vic Rawl, or SC politics, but doesn’t this tell the D party in SC that they might be behind the wrong guy? There must be something off about you if you lose to a guy that doesn’t bother to compete.
Thomas (a3c869) — 6/10/2010 @ 8:14 amIn Australia the phenomenon of voters who vote straight down the ballot is well-known, and is called the “donkey vote”. It’s estimated at about 4% of the vote. But that’s at least in part because voting is compulsory, so some people who have no interest in politics and only vote to avoid the fine just vote in the easiest way possible. (They could just leave the ballot blank, and nobody would know, but perhaps they don’t realise this, or they cast a valid vote because they feel they ought to.) In the USA, one would think that such people wouldn’t bother coming out to vote in the first place, especially in a primary!
Candidates in House of Reps elections used to be listed alphabetically, until in the late ’70s the Democrats took to deliberately nominating people with names near the beginning of the alphabet, in order to take advantage of the donkey vote. Since the ’84 electoral reform package, the order of candidates on the ballot is determined by lot. In Tasmania they go one better and print different batches of ballots with the candidates in different orders. But this makes the production of “how to vote” cards more difficult, because the voter can’t just copy them directly on to the ballot, but has to look for each person’s name.
Milhouse (ea66e3) — 6/10/2010 @ 9:07 amMilhouse: Typically in the United States, one finds multiple offices on the ballot in the same election. The South Carolina Democrats who voted for Greene probably showed up to vote in the primary races for state governor or U.S. House of Representatives, and since they had a U.S. Senate race on the ballot too, they decided to cast a vote for that too.
Daleyrocks: Scott Lee Cohen has an arrest record, but at least he actively campaigned for lieutenant governor; I remember his television commercials. This guy Greene not only has a pending felony charge, but he didn’t raise money, campaign, run ads, or even have a web site. Talk about minimalism.
Joshua (9ede0e) — 6/10/2010 @ 11:05 am