Reply #19: CT: The Dead Vote [View All]

[tbyg52]

A group of University of Connecticut journalism students may have overstated the problem a bit, but they deserve credit nonetheless for a recent class project that underscored the need to update voter registration records.

The study found more than 300 state residents who appeared to have voted after they died, a figure that triggered rapid heart palpitations in and an investigation by Connecticut's chief elections officer, Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz, when she read about the project in The Courant.

Fortunately, most instances of dead people voting were linked to clerical errors rather than fraud or an unnatural phenomenon. In some cases, towns weren't notified of the deaths and so failed to remove the names from voting lists. Those errors were compounded when a resident or a relative with the same name as the deceased showed up to cast a ballot. In a handful of cases, voters were still very much alive, Ms. Bysiewicz said.

More:
http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/editorials/hc-deadvoters.artapr28,0,6911660.story