Apologies if this belongs in the Election (or other) Forum.
Yesterday I received an absentee ballot in the mail for the September 14th primary.
It was addressed to my stepmother, who died last year.
Doesn’t the government have any sort of checks and balances to ensure that this doesn’t happen? I don’t know if it’s the fraud aspect that bothers me, or the fact that the government is wasting our money sending out ballots to the deceased.
I called the phone number listed on the instructions, but was disconnected twice.
Who would I contact about this?
I would presume that they do check for this. I would NOT presume that they are perfect.
Your stepmother fell through the cracks; I wonder how many others were removed properly. I also wonder how many were mistakenly removed even though they are still alive.
Back in 2004 I volunteered to man the phone center for the local governor’s race, making election day calls, arranging rides for people who needed them, etc. The Secretary of State managed to do an extremely bad job of purging the voter registration lists, and we received many reports of people being told at the poll that they were dead.
Last I heard, the only ways to get off the rolls is to not vote in a Presidential Election, or to have yourself taken off.
I don’t think most Boards of Elections have the budget to regularly scrub the rolls any other way. What are they supposed to do? Read the obituaries? Check against death certificates? What if there are two people with the same name? Take them both off?
My grandmother died the day after Thanksgiving, 2004. She lasted voted that year. Flash forward 2 years to Election Day, 2006. My grandfather went to vote, the registrar asked where his wife was. She was still in that big book of voters right after my grandfather.
Currently they verify addresses (at least in North Carolina) to make sure you’re the right you. There are no addresses on Death Certificates, as far as I know. Also people don’t always have the courtesy of dying in their home state. Setting up some sort of cross-referencing system would be a huge logistical nightmare, which would not really improve upon the current system, because dead people don’t vote… except in Chicago.
I assume there is some kind of envelope for mailing, an inner envelope identifying who voted (so they can’t both vote absentee and at the polls) plus the ballot itself. How about marking the thing that identifies the voter “Deceased please remove from registration” and mailing it back
To present the opposite point of view, it does need to be said that there is a value to extending the electorate to zombies – at least, unlike many living voters, they are looking for candidates with Braaaiiiiins!
Since election regulations are state/local, there’s no one size fits all answer here. But in Missouri there are periodic purges of voter lists. Periodic doesn’t mean after every election, it basically means when the Republicans and Democrats both agree their current lists are obsolete.
However, I’ve always been required to prove my identity, with a photo ID and/or matching signatures with my voter ID card, so I’m not as worried about fraud at the polling place as I am fraud in voter elegibility in the first place.
And no, my parents’ and grandparents’ death certificates didn’t have any indication where they lived, just the city where they died.
If you released a herd (is that the right collective?) of zombies in the halls of the US congress, all the congress clowns would die, but at the end of the day, you would find all the zombies dead of starvation, because they couldn’t find a single brain in the entire building.
I would think the effort to create & operate some sort of “checks & balances” for this would cost quite a bit more than sending out an absentee ballot one time.
Clearly they failed at the “check” part, but the “balance” solution seems obvious: for every absentee ballot they send to a dead Republican, they should also send one to a dead Democrat, and vice versa.
Does this not cause considerable problems with personation?
In the UK there is an electoral roll which every household fills in each year so the list is pretty much up to date, only people who have died since the last roll was compiled being send ballot papers.
Seems to work very well and no one (AFAIA) has ever suggested that the cost is disproportionate to the benefit.
What state are you in? In Florida I have to apply for an absentee ballot for every election. Is there some place that lets you default to an absentee ballot.
Yes. California, for example, lets you apply for permanent absentee status (I think they renamed it to “Vote by Mail”). You’ll keep getting ballots unless you fail to return a major one of some kind… I forget which. Presidential? Primary? Dunno.
The dead should be allowed to vote for dead politicians. That way, if the dead come back to life and feast on the living, there won’t be a constitutional crisis - there will already be a zombie shadow government.
But there could very easily be two people with the same name living at the same address – John Wilson, father and son, and son could be disenfranchised if the father died.
