Dead Trapped On Earthly Plane, Fond Of Voting

Spiritually tethered to the voting booth and fascinated by the letter "D," kind supervisors of elections need to help the dead move on.

From an investigation by the Poughkeepsie Journal:

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.
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Among the Journal's findings:

# The Journal identified dead people on the voter rolls in all 62 counties and people in as many as 45 counties who had votes recorded after they had died.

# One address in the Bronx was listed as the home for as many as 191 registered voters who had died. The address is 5901 Palisade Ave., site of the Hebrew Home for the Aged.

# Democrats who cast votes after they died outnumbered Republicans by more than a 4-to-1 margin. The reason: Most of them came from Democrat-dominated New York City, where higher population produced more matches.

Meanwhile in a Miami Herald letter to the editor from put-upon early voter Rick Kendle:

I decided to try early voting at the Miami Beach City Hall. It was a horrible experience. I felt like a common criminal. In addition to providing my voter-registration card, I had to swipe my driver's license in a machine, then sign a screen on the machine.

They didn't like my signature, so they asked me to sign again and to make it look identical to the signature on my registration card.

It made me think of how African-American citizens were treated in the 1950s when they tried to vote.

That's funny, it made me think of the 1997 Miami mayoral election that got tossed for fraud, including extreme absentee-voting by the dead. Congrats to the Miami Beach officials who are determined to run a clean election despite drama queens among the public like Rick Kendle.

Voter fraud does more than just effect local elections; it undermines democracy itself. If to prevent that it means voting officials have to be at least as careful as a cashier taking a check for a haircut, I'm sure we can stand it.