Votes cast in the names of deceased people
 |
Voting in the name of a deceased person is a form of vote fraud in which someone casts a vote under the name of a deceased person, whose name remains on the state's list of registered voters.
There is debate surrounding the extent to which this and other forms of voter fraud occur. John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky—with The Heritage Foundation, which describes itself as a conservative think tank—wrote that "the media aren’t doing our democracy any favors by summarily dismissing the existence of voter fraud – like the almost 1,200 proven cases in the Heritage Foundation’s election fraud database – while questioning the very need for accurate voter rolls."[1][2] According to the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy institute which describes itself as progressive, "The consensus from credible research and investigation is that the rate of illegal voting is extremely rare, and the incidence of certain types of fraud – such as impersonating another voter – is virtually nonexistent."[3][4]
This and other pages on Ballotpedia cover types of election and voter fraud for which there are documented cases and around which there is debate concerning the frequency of instances and proposed responses.
Relevant research
A sampling of research related to voting under a deceased person's name and the presence of those names on voter lists, arranged in reverse chronological order, is presented below.
Heritage Foundation
The Heritage Foundation's Voter Fraud Database contained, as of December 2019, 19 cases since 1997 in which one or more individuals were found to have voted or attempted to vote in the name of a deceased voter. Cases of both in-person and absentee fraud were documented. Heritage states that its database contains a sampling of "election fraud cases from across the country, broken down by state, where individuals were either convicted of vote fraud, or where a judge overturned the results of an election."[5]
Government Accountability Office
In 2014, the Government Accountability Office, which describes itself as "an independent, nonpartisan agency that works for Congress," conducted a literature review of studies into in-person voter fraud.[6] The review stated the following: "Five states provided us with investigative studies that focused on specific types of election fraud. ... The one study that included some information on allegations of in-person voter fraud examined instances of votes cast in the name of deceased persons in one state. It examined about 200 questioned votes that were cast in the November 2010 election and ultimately determined that all but 5 of the questioned votes could be attributed to errors by state or local officials—including clerical errors, data matching errors, errors in scanning voter registration forms, and the issuance of absentee ballots in the wrong name—or to applications for absentee ballots by voters who died before the election. For the remaining 5 allegations, the study could not conclusively determine whether in-person voter fraud occurred."[7][8]
Pew Center on the States
The Pew Center on the States commissioned a study, released in 2012, to estimate the number of inaccurate or no longer valid voter registrations nationally. Among other things, the study concluded that there were an estimated 1.8 million deceased voters still on voter lists.[9][10]
Brennan Center for Justice
The Brennan Center for Justice released a report in 2007 by Justin Levitt in which he stated that "flawed matches of lists from one place (death records) to another (voter rolls) are often responsible for misinformation. Sometimes the interpretation is flawed: two list entries under the same name indicate different individuals. Sometimes the lists themselves are flawed: as Hilde Stafford discovered in 2006, individuals who are in fact quite spry are occasionally listed as deceased on the Social Security Administration’s master files. And sometimes, because of clerical error by election workers or voters or both, an individual is marked as voting when she did not in fact cast a ballot, or is marked as voting under the wrong person’s name. ... Indeed, a 2007 investigation of about 100 “dead voters” in Missouri revealed that every single purported case was properly attributed either to a matching error, a problem in the underlying data, or a clerical error by elections officials or voters."[11]
Case studies
This section provides a sample of two cases in which someone was convicted of voting in a deceased person's name.
- In 2017, Toni Lee Newbill, a Colorado woman, pleaded guilty to voting in the 2013 general election and in the 2016 Republican primary in her father's name after he died in 2012. Newbill's attorney stated that she continued to receive mail ballots for her father after his death. He said Newbill had attempted to remove her father's name from the state's voter list and voted for him after continuing to receive ballots for him. CBS Denver reported that the El Paso County Clerk and Recorder office sent Newbill a form to have her father removed from the voter list in January 2015.[12] Newbill was fined $500 and sentenced to 30 hours of community service and 18 months of unsupervised probation, Colorado Springs Gazette reported.[13]
- In 2007, three poll workers in Tennessee pleaded guilty to felony and misdemeanor charges, including casting two votes in the names of deceased people in the 2005 state Senate special election in favor of Democrat Ophelia Ford. Results showed Ford 13 votes ahead of her competitor, but results were voided after fraud allegations; Ford won a subsequent election for the seat. The Commercial Appeal reported that Verline Mayo received two years of probation, 200 hours of community service, and $1,000 in fines. Gertrude Otteridge and Mary McClatcher each received one year of probation in addition to community service and fines.[14]
Voter list maintenance
All states have rules under which they maintain voter rolls—or, check and remove certain names from their lists of registered voters. Most states are subject to the parameters set by The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).[15] The NVRA requires states to make efforts to remove deceased individuals and individuals who have become ineligible due to a change of address. It prohibits removing registrants from voter lists within 90 days of a federal election due to change of address unless a registrant has requested to be removed, or from removing people from voter lists solely because they have not voted. The NVRA says that states may remove names from their registration lists under certain other circumstances and that their methods for removing names must be uniform and nondiscriminatory.[16] According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, "In most states, election officials receive information on deceased voters from the state department of vital statistics, the state department of health, or another agency that handles death records. In some states officials may also gather this information from other sources, such as obituary notices, copies of death certificates, and notification from a close relative."[17]
See also
- Electoral fraud
- Election governance by state
- Voting and election governance: Support and opposition topics
- Voting rights for convicted felons
- Voter identification laws by state
- Mail ballot collection and return laws by state
- Laws permitting noncitizens to vote in the United States
Footnotes
- ↑ The Heritage Foundation, "Voter Fraud Exists – Even Though Many in the Media Claim It Doesn’t," October 29, 2018
- ↑ The Heritage Foundation, "About Heritage," accessed February 10, 2020
- ↑ The Brennan Center, "Resources on Voter Fraud Claims," June 26, 2017
- ↑ The Brennan Center, "Progressive Groups Oppose White House Prison Reform Bill," April 18, 2018
- ↑ Ballotpedia searched the database for three terms: "deceased," "died," and "dead." Nineteen entries included voters who attempted to or did vote in a deceased person's name.
- ↑ Government Accountability Office, "About GAO," accessed December 18, 2019
- ↑ The Government Accountability Office wrote the following about the study's methodology: "In conducting this study, the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division reviewed documentation of the questioned votes, such as poll lists and voter registration records, to determine whether the questioned votes occurred as a result of clerical error, such as marking the wrong individual as having voted, or for some other reason, such as fraud."
- ↑ Government Accountability Office, "Issues Related to State Voter Identification Laws," September 2014
- ↑ Pew stated the following about the study's methodology: "The Pew Center on the States commissioned RTI International, a prominent nonprofit, nonpartisan research institute, to assess the quality and accuracy of state voter registration lists in the United States. RTI used a unique database maintained by Catalist, LLC, a leading aggregator and processor of voter information, to estimate the number of records that are inaccurate or no longer valid. For this report, a 'no longer valid' record represents a person who is on the rolls but no longer eligible to cast a vote, likely due to having moved or died. An 'inaccurate' record represents an eligible voter whose file has incorrect data. Catalist regularly updates its database for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, thus providing a sound basis for making national-level estimates of no longer valid and inaccurate records, duplicate registrations, and other important measures of list quality. The organization buys voter lists from states and local governments, and combines that information with data from other public and commercial sources, such as the National Change of Address database run by the U.S. Postal Service, The resulting database contains a robust set of profiles of American voters and nonvoters built from registration lists and expanded upon with more information. Because not all states provide complete records, an analysis of Catalist’s data likely underestimates the number of inaccurate and no longer valid records."
- ↑ The Pew Center on the States, "Inaccurate, Costly, and Inefficient: Evidence That America’s Voter Registration System Needs an Upgrade," February 2012
- ↑ The Brennan Center for Justice, "The Truth About Voter Fraud," 2007
- ↑ CBS Denver, "Dying To Vote: CBS4 Investigation Finds Woman Charged With Casting Dead Father’s Ballot," November 7, 2016
- ↑ Colorado Springs Gazette, "Golden woman pleads guilty to voting twice for deceased father," March 8, 2017
- ↑ The Commercial Appeal, "Judge: Let's Air Details of Fraud," May 22, 2007
- ↑ The Justice Department notes, "Six States (Idaho, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Wyoming) are exempt from the NVRA because, on and after August 1, 1994, they either had no voter-registration requirements or had election-day voter registration at polling places with respect to elections for federal office."
- ↑ The United States Department of Justice, "The National Voter Registration Act of 1993," accessed Aprl 4, 2023
- ↑ National Conference of State Legislatures, "Voter List Accuracy," August 22, 2019
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||
