I think people have been eager bystanders to the Alvin Greene train wreck, forwarding along the cringe-worthy interviews and quotes, without recognizing the real import of his victory in South Carolina. After all, California’s statewide Republican primary for insurance commissioner could yield a similarly strange result, with a candidate who spent less money than Greene in a state five times the size currently leading the former minority leader of the California Assembly, and there’s hardly the same outcry. Two major differences between the Brian FitzGerald and Alvin Greene (aside from the racial aspect, which is probably driving some of the coverage) – there’s a plausible reason for a protest vote against Villines among the state GOP (he voted for tax increases; end of story), and the South Carolina elections, unlike California’s, are completely unverifiable.

That’s the real story here. It’s possible that enough protest voters intentionally voted for Greene to send a message about their distaste for establishment candidates. But the point is that we don’t know. We’ll never know. Because there’s basically no real-world record of that South Carolina Democratic primary. It all exists inside the machines.

At last week’s hearing, (losing candidate Vic) Rawl trotted out a parade of forensic, academic and computer experts who pointed to security, software and statistical irregularities.

Election protection advocates have seized on the inexplicable primary outcome as evidence of why such machines should have a voter-verifiable paper trail. South Carolina is now one of just a handful of states that offer paperless machines as voters’ only option.

States all over the country embraced touch-screen machines after the Help America Vote Act freed up federal money for them in 2002. But voters lost confidence in the machines after experts challenged their security and reliability, and now a full 33 states give every voter some form of paper record to review.

“There is no state more representative of the need for a verifiable standard for nationwide systems than South Carolina,” said Sean Flaherty, a policy analyst for the California-based advocacy group Verified Voting.

You would think that the Democratic Party in the state, if they were thinking just strategically, would have turned over the Greene nomination and honored the request of Vic Rawl. But they overwhelmingly voted down the protest, because it would have essentially caused an uproar in the state. The fact that the ES&S machinery is completely unverifiable, that there’s no way to “confirm or disconfirm the apparent outcome of an election,” as Flaherty says in the article, represents a crisis for democracy. And it’s a shame that Rawl ended his protest so quietly, but perhaps in the back of his head he didn’t want to stir up this hornet’s nest, either.

It’s positive that activists want to preserve the memory cards from the election, but inevitably these will give some version of the same result that we saw on Election Day. That has nothing to do with whether or not that result was correct. A better use of activist time would be to demand a voter-verified paper trail for all South Carolina elections. But with the state in a deep recession, that’s probably not happening for a while either, due to the cost.

We just shouldn’t live with this. Outcry about election protection has yielded some results across the country, but not yet in South Carolina. It’s not that Greene was a plant or that voters divined his race or that a series of odd coincidences led to his victory – it’s that there’s no way to know for sure. And that’s a serious problem.