When asked by NBC's David Gregory on Sunday if Greene's election was legitimate, senior White House adviser David Axelrod said, "It doesn't appear so to me. It was a mysterious deal."
Axelrod said: "The whole thing is odd. I don't really know how to explain it and I don't think anybody else does either. ... How [Greene] won the primary is a big mystery, and until you resolve that I don't think he can claim to be a strong, credible candidate."
But many political observers are becoming convinced that they do know how Greene won: A combination of faulty voting machines and foul play by political opponents.
Greene handily defeated opponent Vic Rawl in Tuesday's primary, winning with 59 percent of the vote to Rawl' 41 percent, despite not having run any sort of visible campaign, not having set up a campaign Web site, and being unemployed. And it quickly emerged that Greene is facing a felony obscenity charge over an incident in which he allegedly showed a college student obscene photos from the Internet.
So how to explain the unlikely election result? One theory, propagated by BradBlog's Brad Friedman, is that Greene was the beneficiary of phony voting-machine results. In 25 precincts, Greene received more votes than were actually cast; and while Rawl won absentee ballots by a whopping 84-to-16 percentage point margin, the election-day results showed Greene winning by 18 percentage points.
