This has probably been covered before on the SDMB – hey, purt’ near everything under the sun has!
So I get my ballot off in the mail on October 5th…and on October 11th a mafia hit-man mistakes me for a Federal witness and whacks me. Dead as the Sonny and Cher show. Is there any mechanism in place for my ballot to be pulled, or is it going to be counted? Do the authorities forward death certificates to the registrar of voters? On a timely basis? At all?
Not quite the same thing as filling out departed gram’paw’s absentee ballot, which is criminal fraud. In the case I’m envisioning, no one breaks the law.
Well, is a reductio ad absurdam actually a rebuttal of the principle?
If I die three weeks before election day, it is at least theoretically feasible for some department of public records clerk to send a list to the RofV.
I think it’s a legitimate answer. I mean, you could keel over in the polling place immediately after handing your ballot in. Should they discard it if you do?
On principle I would say no. We’re never going to learn of all the people who die between casting their vote and it being counted, so as long as someone is alive when they cast the vote, it should be counted.
There isn’t a method, a practice. No one in the polling place has the authority to pronounce someone deceased. But the clerks at whatever it’s called – vital statistics or public records of whatnot – they do.
Anyway, the question seems to have been answered: nobody actually coordinates those lists.
(I wonder if it could come up in a recount lawsuit, where the election was decided by one vote… There have been trials where that sort of thing has happened, and individual voters were cross-examined. Of course, the next problem is that once the ballot has been taken out of the envelope, it can’t be individually identified any more, so…never mind!)
After a moment’s thought, I realized what the question must be, and that it was something I had wondered about myself. But more in an idle curiosity way, not in a “this is really bothering me” way. As long as the person was alive when they actually voted, I don’t have a problem counting their vote if they die before the official election day.
My grandfather died on Election Day in 2008, almost certainly after voting absentee, since he’d been in the hospital for a month before his death. I assume his vote would still count as valid, even if the election officials had been notified about his death – after all, if he’d voted in person and had a massive heart attack later in the day, it’s not like there would have been ANY way to ID which vote was his and discard it – but I can’t help wondering what would have happened if he had died a day earlier.
Even more so if it had happened twelve years later, because he was an avid Fox News watcher who would almost certainly have voted for Trump, and I can easily imagine his next of kin, my mom, actively TRYING to have his ballot disqualified, something she would not have been inclined to do with a vote for McCain. There’s a black comedy plot in here somewhere…
IIRC there was an episode of “Drunk History” detailing a situation where the candidate died but his campaign folks pretended he was just sick. He won the election. Googling, I found this:
How does this work? I assume you mean 5th and 11th of October. Do some places start counting ballots as they come in? I assumed they were all stored until the closing of the in person voting and then the opening of the envelopes and counting of the ballots (some time in the evening of November 3rd) would commence. Even if they are counting as they go along, don’t they still match signatures on a ballot to the voter rolls to confirm identity?
OK, how about this one? Alice is 17 years old, but will turn 18 on Halloween. Since she’ll be 18 by election day, she’s eligible to vote. And she’s worried about problems at the polling place, so she gets a ballot early, and turns it in by October 25th. But unfortunately, she’s not as conscientious about texting and driving as she is about exercising her civic franchise, and so she gets in a car crash and dies on October 27th, while she was still 17. So she was never actually eligible to vote at all.
Some states do leave the envelopes untouched until election day (which is a very bad idea this year with the extra large number of people voting by mail), but others check the voters’ info right away and remove the ballots from the envelopes if everything is okay. They might be allowed to scan the ballots into the system (but not have the machine release a count) or they might just organize the ballots into stacks to be fed into the machines on election day.
My guess is her death wouldn’t affect things one way or the other. She voted while still age 17 so her vote wouldn’t count. Had she showed up in person for early voting on October 25th, they wouldn’t let her vote, and I assume the same principle applies to mail in ballots.
I’ve never heard of a state banning someone from voting early because they’re not 18 yet even though they’ll be 18 on election day. That would be ridiculous. Many states even allow you to vote in a primary in the spring/summer if you’ll be 18 for the general election in November.
I don’t see why it matters. You can drop dead in the booth right after casting a vote and it should count. If you are alive when you vote then it should count whenever it is the votes are added up, which should not be completed for some time after election anyway.
Every state does it its own way. See today’s Votemaster for a state by state description of how absentee ballots are handled and counted.
As for the OP, here is the Votemaster’s answer from Saturday’s Q&A:
“A: As a legal matter, it varies from state to state. Some states allow such ballots, others do not. As a practical matter, it is nearly impossible for a state to toss out such a ballot, unless someone close to the deceased makes a serious effort to inform the authorities of the voter’s demise. This does not happen very often.”
Everything about the elections is done state-by-state.
If you’re alive at the moment that you vote, your ballot should be counted. Whether you die in the next moment, or at any time before the people you elected actually take office, is immaterial.
The factual answer seems to be “it depends”. Most states allow the votes to be counted, some don’t. In practicality, It doesn’t sound like they are typically challenged.