Reply #43: No paper trail = no evidence

[Jane Eyre]

I absolutely agree with you that votes can't be trusted that are counted in secret. South Carolina uses Diebold touch screen voting with no paper trail. The Democratic Party there should challenge that system and challenge it strongly, but they need to do it a different way.

Throwing out an election based upon the fact that Democratic voters may or may not have elected a "total idiot" who has no money or name recognition and who is facing a felony charge that voters did not know about isn't a good basis for an argument. None of the circumstantial evidence that you cite is a valid reason to throw out the results of election. There are plenty of idiots who are elected in perfectly legitimate elections. And there is nothing in the constitution that prevents a convicted felon (which Mr. Greene is not) from serving in the US Senate.

The South Carolina Democratic Party Executive Committee arrived at the only possible reasonable conclusion after painstakingly hearing and considering all the evidence: that there is not enough evidence to throw out the election. That doesn't mean that electoral fraud didn't happen, but you have to have a system in place to be able to prove the results and their state doesn't have that. Had they voted to throw out the results of this election, then the results of every other election in the state would be in question including those where Democrats won.

And don't forget that Alvin Greene is the first black US Senate candidate in the state since Reconstruction in a state where the Democratic Party membership is overwhelmingly African American. Had the SC Dems voted to throw out the results of the election won by the black guy, but not any others, based on a finding that the machines used statewide in every election don't work properly....well, I can only begin to imagine the fallout from that decision. I'm glad that the SC Democratic Party reached the only reasonable conclusion and I hope that they will step up the fight for verifiable paper trails for future elections.