In South Carolina, candidates file for candidacy with the state parties, who then certify that those candidates will be fit to serve if elected and mail one big check each to the state Election Commission.

"He tried to write a personal check, and we told him, 'No, we can't take a personal check,'" SC Democratic Party spokeswoman Keiana Barrett said.

Greene then left and returned having opened a new account at NBSC, the closest branch of which is six blocks away from the party's headquarters in downtown Columbia. He gave a check to the party and spoke with Chairwoman Carol Fowler.

"The strange thing about it was when he came in, he didn't say who his opponent was. He wasn't talking about those types of things," Barrett said. "When the chair asked where he got the money from, he said it was his own personal money that he had been saving."

Fowler told Greene that running a statewide campaign can be expensive, requiring a lot of work.

"He said, you know, he has these friends that would help him," Barrett said. "He didn't say who these friends were."

Greene, a 32-year-old unemployed Army veteran, won South Carolina's Democratic Senate primary last Tuesday with over 100,000 votes, earning the nomination to challenge Republican Sen. Jim DeMint in the fall. Greene has sparked accusations of being a plant, and Vic Rawl, the Democratic opponent Greene beat, has brought in election-data-analysis experts to try to figure out how Greene got so many votes despite little or no evidence, as explained by the state Democratic Party, that Greene ran an actual campaign.

Fowler has publicly called on Greene to leave the race; so far, he has declined to do so.