CBS Los Angeles has compared voting records with death records and found hundreds of people who have ostensibly continued to vote for well after a decade following their demise:
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — A comparison of records by David Goldstein, investigative reporter for CBS2/KCAL9, has revealed hundreds of so-called dead voters in Southern California, a vast majority of them in Los Angeles County.
“He took a lot of time choosing his candidates,†said Annette Givans of her father, John Cenkner.
Cenkner died in Palmdale in 2003. Despite this, records show that he somehow voted from the grave in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2010.
But he’s not the only one.
CBS2 compared millions of voting records from the California Secretary of State’s office with death records from the Social Security Administration and found hundreds of so-called dead voters.
So far there’s no polling data on which candidates are preferred by the dead.
A few hundred out of hundreds of thousands of registered voters doesn’t sound like many but a) that’s just in LA County and b) quite a few elections are determined by very small numbers of votes.
Wonder how many of those voters also have up to date credit histories, utility bills, etc. Identity theft is a possibility. However matching voter rolls and the SSA master death record is frowned upon.
There was a nice piece on this a couple of years ago. Most of these were cases where ballots sent to the homes of older people who were unable to get out to vote. When the voter died, ballots kept getting sent to the house. The surviving spouse continued to vote for the deceased. Once again, a problem that won’t be fixed by voter ID.
Steve
Something depends on whether those are absentee votes or votes at the polling place. It’s a problem regardless but I guess we need to know more before we can determine how big a problem it is.
The reality doesn’t matter. The issue is legitimacy, and if politicians cannot demonstrate that they are taking care to make sure the election is fraud-free, then the government is delegitimized to at least some degree.
Dave- Will dig for article, but by my (admittedly not perfect memory) there were close to zero cases of this at the polls, it was a ballot problem. I agree that government should to fix this, especially since it is well documented and there is quite a bit of it. However, it comes down to old fashioned politics again. Voting by ballot favors one party so they aren’t willing to have that reform.
Steve
Here is a 2011 Powerline piece that, IMO, gives a less partisan response to the back and forth beliefs of voter fraud beliefs: