Hudson "Valley's dead cast their votes" (Poughkeepsie Journal, New York)

[jody]

"Valley's dead cast their votes"

The three mid-Hudson Valley residents had little in common during their lives, but share one thing now: They all have records of casting a vote after they had died.

Names still remain on rolls

The new statewide database of registered voters contains as many as 77,000 dead people on its rolls, and as many as 2,600 of them have cast votes from the grave, according to a Poughkeepsie Journal computer-assisted analysis.

The Journal's analysis is the first to examine the potential for errors and fraud in New York's three-month-old database. It matched names, dates of birth and ZIP codes in the state's database of 11.7 million voter registration records against the same information in the Social Security Administration's "Death Master File," a database of 77 million records of deaths dating to 1937.

[acmavm]

1. Yep, things are looking pretty dicey for another election. If three

is really the 'charm', what's going to happen??????

[Dr.Phool]

2. Don't give Florida anymore ideas.

When they decide to scrub the lists again.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to prove you are alive?

[Oreo]

3. How much do you want to bet they voted Republican?

[OnTheOtherHand]

4. you have to read the whole story to learn

that all three of these cases have reasonable explanations.

The story does have the charming detail of the state board's CIO writing, "Of course we are concerned about people voting if they are dead." It also points out that some of the problems are in the Death Master File, not voting records at all.

[jody]

5. And the other 2,600 who cast votes from the grave have reasonable explanations? nt

[OnTheOtherHand]

8. unknown, but possible based on the report

Typically, records of votes by the dead are the result of bookkeeping errors and do not result in the casting of extra ballots. The Journal did not find any fraud in the local matches it investigated.

[Awsi Dooger]

9. That's the meaningful paragraph in the article

Including the immediately preceding sentence, ""Having deceased residents on the rolls can create records of a vote that never took place."

Imagine the frustration of the reporters, nearly 81,000 crosschecked matches and zilch. Not a single suspicious example they could point to. The three examples teased at the top are an accounting error, a woman with the same name mistakenly signing for her deceased mother, and an absentee vote from a son mistakenly added to his father's record. More of the same if the other 2600 cases were examined. Anyone assigned to evaluate those would die of monotonous boredom before finding anything.

When people die, especially natural deaths by the elderly, it's not adequately or quickly reported, to official agencies or elsewhere. That's the valid point from the article. When I worked for a casino I once had to contact former customers by phone, ones who were in our database as sportsbook players and poker players. It was obvious when I checked the dates of birth in our computer that many of them had probably died. Sure enough, it was one awkward phone chat after another with reminiscing widows.

[OnTheOtherHand]

11. pretty much

I wouldn't be shocked if someone, somewhere, found some indication that someone else reeeeeeally wanted to vote and did it in a dead person's name. But this story implies that it's very uncommon at most -- which jibes with everything else I've seen recently about so-called "voter fraud" (ineligible people voting). Not to take anything away from Chicago.

Yours is a funny story -- sort of a different twist on "cold calls."

[jody]

12. Thanks. n/t

[DRoseDARs]

6. Who's getting the zombie vote? Not Ving Rhames, that's for sure. n/t

[Sherman A1]

7. Which brings us to the fundamental question...

should Death be a deterrent to voting? Does your citizenship end with death? Why do the living get all the perks? Hmmmmmm????

[Bill Bored]

10. As long as they cast them on lever machines, I don't care if they "live" to be 200! nt