Senate nominee Alvin Greene charged with showing porn to college student

The man whose unexpected victory in the South Carolina Democratic primary for the US Senate sparked concerns of voting fraud has been indicted for showing obscene materials to a college student, the Associated Press reported Friday.

Alvin Greene, an unemployed former military service member, won the June primary to run for the Senate despite being an almost complete unknown in South Carolina politics, prompting many within the Democratic Party to question the legitimacy of his victory.

The AP reports:

Greene was indicted Friday on two charges, including a felony charge of showing pornography to a South Carolina college student.

A Richland County grand jury indicted Green for disseminating, procuring or promoting obscenity — a felony — as well as a misdemeanor charge of communicating obscene materials to a person without consent.

Greene ... was arrested in November after authorities said he approached a student in a University of South Carolina computer lab, showed her obscene photos online, then talked about going to her dorm room.

Greene handily defeated opponent Vic Rawl in the June primary, winning with 59 percent of the vote to Rawl's 41 percent, despite not having run any sort of visible campaign, not having set up a campaign Web site, and being unemployed.

One theory to explain this, supported 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.

Other theories about Greene's victory have also abounded. South Carolina Democratic Rep. James Clyburn claimed that "someone" -- presumably the Republican Party -- inserted "plant" candidates into the Democratic primaries, to ruin Democratic chances in the November elections.

Even White House adviser David Axelrod wasn't buying the results. When asked by NBC's David Gregory if Greene's election was legitimate, Axelrod said, "It doesn't appear so to me. It was a mysterious deal."

But the South Carolina Democratic Party voted quickly to uphold Greene's victory, stating that there wasn't enough evidence of voting irregularities to overturn the results.

Since his nomination, Greene has given a number of bizarre interviews to the press, including one at the Guardian in which he suggested that South Carolina could create jobs by manufacturing and selling action figures of Greene dressed in his Air Force uniform.

Greene faces prominent Republican Sen. Jim DeMint in November.