United States Senate election in South Carolina, 2010
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County results
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The 2010 United States Senate election in South Carolina was held on November 2, 2010. Incumbent Republican U.S. Senator Jim DeMint won re-election to a second term. Alvin Greene, the Democratic nominee, was the first major-party African-American U.S. Senate candidate in South Carolina since Reconstruction.
Controversies surrounded the Democratic nominee, Alvin Greene. Greene's primary election win and his margin of victory surprised pundits. As of the primary, he had held no public campaign events, raised no money, and did not have a campaign website. A review of the primary election showed that of the state's 46 counties, half had a significant gap between the absentee and primary day ballots. For example, in Lancaster County, Vic Rawl won the absentees with 84 percent, while Greene won primary day by a double digit margin. Rawl's campaign manager also claimed, "In only two of 88 precincts, do the number of votes Greene got plus the number we got equal the total cast."
U.S. Congressman James Clyburn recommended Greene drop out of the race or else he would face a federal investigation into his candidacy – even as he faced a felony obscenity charge in Richland County from November 2009. Clyburn said, "There were some real shenanigans going on in the South Carolina primary. I don't know if he was a Republican plant; he was someone's plant." Political blog FiveThirtyEight's Tom Schaller suggested three possibilities: a legitimate vote, the vote was rigged, or the vote-counting software was corrupted. Schaller ruled out the possibility of Republican infiltration, similar to Rush Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos" in 2008.
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