Should the votes of dead people be counted?

[underpants]

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g51lYdB8i6BdEmw53fQR5sVl9JqAD924CPPO4

If you vote by mail, but die before Election Day, does your vote count? It depends on where you lived.

Oregon counts ballots no matter what happens to the voter. So does Florida. But in South Dakota, if you die before the election, so does your vote.

There are no military standards governing voting by soldiers. Rather, their mailed-in ballots are counted at the individual election districts where they are registered to vote. But like civilian votes, no one keeps track of whether the ballots of soldiers are thrown out because they died after casting them.

"No one can tell you that," said Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat, head of the Overseas Voting Foundation in Munich. "Every single election jurisdiction can do it the way it wants. And there are more than 7,000 of them."

Thirty-one states allow some form of early voting.

Ballots cast by the dead are usually the focus of fraud allegations, as happened in Washington's extremely tight 2004 gubernatorial race, decided by a margin of 129 votes out of 3 million cast. More than a dozen ballots were linked to dead people.

But some advocates say legitimate, mail-in votes from people who die before Election Day should be counted, particularly in rural elections, where races can hang on a handful of votes.

"In Montana, there have been several legislative seats decided by one, two, three votes," said Tim Storey of the National Conference of State Legislatures, an organization that recently looked at 12 mostly Western states and found that half have no rules governing ballots of the deceased.

Those remaining states — Colorado, Idaho, Minnesota and Utah — demand that such ballots be rejected, leaving Montana and Oregon as the only states that count them.

In California's San Diego County, for example, 45 percent of the presidential vote arrived by mail. Similar numbers surfaced across the country. Election experts have predicted that as many as 25 percent of voters will vote by mail in November.

[liberal N proud]

1. Only Chicago

And I think they stopped that practice long ago
:sarcasm:

[DailyGrind51]

6. If we still didn't count the votes of the dead in Chicago,

do you really believe we would re-elect the inarticulate son of a corrupt powerful political dynasty to continue to run the place into a financial nightmare? Oh, wait, we did that for America in 2004 too! Never mind.:o

[Yupster]

10. Cubs legendary announcer Harry Carey said

he wanted to be buried in Chicago so he'd still be able to vote.

[BlooInBloo]

2. Seems like if you're alive when the vote is legally case, that's all that should matter...

Anything else is voting fraud, by my lights.

[islandmkl]

3. don't anybody tell LBJ they don't count....

imagine LBJ in 'heaven' thanking all the people who preceded him for their support...

[underpants]

7. LBJ and the Jimmy Carter story

I think the quote from LBJ was "dead people have a right to vote too" ;-)

Jimmy Carter tells a story about how as Governor of Georgia he sought to change the existing laws-that was that a surviving spouse could continue to vote for the deceased former. Well should have been a no brainer right? Uh-uh he ran it much opposition and finally (true story) they settled on a compromise--a survivor could continue to vote for their past other for one Presidential election after (and all state and local elections within that timeframe).

[HereSince1628]

4. Gives new meaning to absentee ballots.

BTW who doesn't think of cemeteries as permanent addresses?

[Lint Head]

5. Republicans are dead mentally. They vote.

:dem:

[izzie]

8. I guess how the counting is going lets you see how they will be

counted. Sounds like a George Bush answer but I swear if you are near winning and need the votes to win they then will be counted. Isn't that the way the military vote worked in Fa.for George Bush? If I re-call some 'after voting days' votes were put in to his pile. Bet it is the same with 'dead peoples' vote.

[Lars39]

9. If the votes were legally cast, yes.

Why would any votes cast early be valid, then?

[slackmaster]

12. Would the moment of "legally cast" be the time the ballot is signed, or when it is postmarked?

It really doesn't matter.

[slackmaster]

11. This is a non-issue as long as each state's policy is implemented consistently

Republicans, Democrats, liberals, conservatives, independents, Moonies, etc. all have the same probability of dying between the time they mail in a ballot and the start of Election Day.

BTW, is the "deadline" midnight or the time the polls open? What if someone mails in a ballot then dies at 4:00 AM on Election Day? It really doesn't matter, as long as the same rule is applied to every ballot within a given state.

This is a classic example of what accountants and economists call a "wash".

[CatWoman]

13. why not? they are getting rebate checks...

This is one stimulus check that may not stimulate anything — except, perhaps, your irritation with the government.

A $600 economic stimulus check, courtesy of the U.S. Treasury, made its way to Roswell earlier this week. It was payable to George A. Coker DECD. Yes, "DECD," as in "deceased." Coker died in May 2007.

said his longtime friend and the executor of the estate, Fulton Magistrate Richard Hicks. Hicks, who filed his deceased friend's 2007 taxes earlier this year, is listed on the federal check as "PERREP" — "personal representative."

Personally, he's peeved.

"There's a $9 trillion national debt, and our government's giving away money to dead people," he said. "As a taxpayer, it offends the hell out of me."

People who qualified for the stimulus check last year can get the cash this year, even if they've gone on to a bigger reward, said Mark Green, at Atlanta-based spokesman for the Internal Revenue Service. It's like a tax return with a refund, he said. "If someone dies, they ... still may qualify for the refund."

How many checks have been sent to dead folks? "That would be a little difficult to answer right now," Green said. The government, he noted, is still mailing checks, and not everyone has applied for the government bonus

http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/northfulton/stories/2008/07/24/stimulus_check.html?cxntlid=homepage_tab_newstab&imw=Y