Experts are turning up some eye-opening trend lines in Alvin Greene's (left) victory over Vic Rawl. | Composite image by POLITICO Experts review S.C. Senate ballots

The campaign of defeated Democratic Senate candidate Vic Rawl has assembled a team of national academic experts to review Tuesday’s perplexing South Carolina primary results that propelled a virtually unknown, underfunded and unemployed candidate to the party’s nomination over a veteran officeholder and public official.

Rawl campaign manager Walter Ludwig tells POLITICO three different teams of experts in election data analysis are combing through the results in the state’s 46 counties and already turning up some eye-opening trend lines.


The review is in response to the shocking victory by 32-year-old Alvin Greene, who, despite never giving a campaign speech or running any television or radio ads, managed to handily defeat Rawl 59 percent to 41 percent. The state party chairwoman has already asked Greene to step aside, and Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) has speculated that he might be a Republican plant.

Greene has pledged to remain in the race and said he has “always been a Democrat.”

While Ludwig cautioned that the campaign is not jumping to any conclusions, he said the experts, who volunteered their services, have already uncovered some “curious” findings in the election data.

One potential red flag: A significant difference between the results of absentee and election day ballots.

According to Ludwig, of the state’s 46 counties, half have a disparity of greater than 10 percentage points between the absentee and election day ballots.

“The election day ballots all favor Mr. Greene. We don’t know what it means,” Ludwig said in an interview. “We did significantly better on absentees than Election Day, which is according to the mathematicians, quite significant. The other reason is, it didn’t happen in any other races on the ballot.”

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.

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.

Greene also racked up a 75 percent or greater margin in one-seventh of all precincts statewide, a mark that Ludwig notes is even difficult for an incumbent to reach.

“This may add up to nothing. This all could be a clerical error. We don’t know, but [we] thought it was worth looking into,” said Ludwig, who added that the experts doing the unpaid research asked that their names not be revealed until they disclose their conclusions.

Ludwig said the experts could be prepared to offer their findings by late Friday but cautioned that it’s likely not to be definitive.

“These are not detectives, they look at huge amounts of election data that say this doesn’t look like it should, or it does,” he said.

Asked what else could explain Greene’s unlikely rise, Ludwig appeared at a loss.

He said the Rawl campaign sent 300,000 e-mails, conducted a quarter million robocalls and logged nearly 17,000 miles to Democratic events around the state.

“I was tracking the guy everywhere and there was nothing to track. Am I kicking myself in the ass? Sure. I’m just not sure what we would’ve done different,” he said.