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Voting and ballot administration: Support and opposition topics


Voting in the name of a deceased person is a course of vote fraud in which someone casts a vote under the proper noun of a deceased person, whose name remains on the land'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 whatsoever favors past summarily dismissing the existence of voter fraud – like the nearly 1,200 proven cases in the Heritage Foundation'southward ballot fraud database – while questioning the very demand 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."[three] [iv]

This and other pages on Ballotpedia cover types of election and voter fraud for which there are documented cases and around which in that location is fence 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 guild, is presented below.

Heritage Foundation

The Heritage Foundation'due south Voter Fraud Database contained, as of December 2019, nineteen cases since 1997 in which one or more than 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 "ballot fraud cases from beyond the country, broken down past state, where individuals were either convicted of vote fraud, or where a gauge overturned the results of an election."[5]

Government Accountability Office

In 2014, the Government Accountability Office, which describes itself equally "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: "5 states provided us with investigative studies that focused on specific types of election fraud. ... The ane report 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. Information technology examined about 200 questioned votes that were cast in the November 2010 ballot and ultimately determined that all only 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 non conclusively determine whether in-person voter fraud occurred."[7] [8]

Pew Center on the States

The Pew Eye on united states of america 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.[ix] [10]

Brennan Center for Justice

The Brennan Center for Justice released a written report in 2007 by Justin Levitt in which he stated that "flawed matches of lists from one place (expiry records) to another (voter rolls) are often responsible for misinformation. Sometimes the interpretation is flawed: two list entries nether the same name indicate different individuals. Sometimes the lists themselves are flawed: equally Hilde Stafford discovered in 2006, individuals who are in fact quite spry are occasionally listed as deceased on the Social Security Administration'south master files. And sometimes, because of clerical error by ballot workers or voters or both, an individual is marked as voting when she did not in fact cast a ballot, or is marked equally voting under the wrong person's name. ... Indeed, a 2007 investigation of about 100 "dead voters" in Missouri revealed that every single purported example was properly attributed either to a matching fault, a problem in the underlying information, or a clerical error past elections officials or voters."[xi]

Example studies

This department provides a sample of two cases in which someone was convicted of voting in a deceased person'southward name.

  • In 2017, Toni Lee Newbill, a Colorado woman, pleaded guilty to voting in the 2013 general ballot and in the 2016 Republican primary in her father'due south proper name later on he died in 2012. Newbill'south attorney stated that she continued to receive mail ballots for her male parent after his decease. He said Newbill had attempted to remove her father'southward proper noun from the state's voter list and voted for him later on continuing to receive ballots for him. CBS Denver reported that the El Paso County Clerk and Recorder part 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 eighteen 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 country Senate special election in favor of Democrat Ophelia Ford. Results showed Ford thirteen votes ahead of her competitor, merely results were voided subsequently fraud allegations; Ford won a subsequent ballot for the seat. The Commercial Appeal reported that Verline Mayo received two years of probation, 200 hours of community service, and $one,000 in fines. Gertrude Otteridge and Mary McClatcher each received one year of probation in add-on to customs service and fines.[14]

Voter listing maintenance

All states accept 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 fix past The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).[xv] The NVRA requires states to make efforts to remove deceased individuals and individuals who have go ineligible due to a alter of accost. It prohibits removing registrants from voter lists within 90 days of a federal election due to alter of address unless a registrant has requested to be removed, or from removing people from voter lists solely considering they take 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.[sixteen] According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, "In near states, election officials receive data on deceased voters from the state department of vital statistics, the state department of health, or another agency that handles expiry records. In some states officials may besides gather this information from other sources, such every bit obituary notices, copies of decease certificates, and notification from a close relative."[17]

Click here for in-depth information on voter list maintenance and other election-related policies in each land.

See also

  • Electoral fraud
  • Election governance by country
  • Voting and election governance: Support and opposition topics
  • Voting rights for convicted felons
  • Voter identification laws by country
  • Mail ballot collection and return laws by state
  • Laws permitting noncitizens to vote in the United States

Footnotes

  1. ↑ The Heritage Foundation, "Voter Fraud Exists – Even Though Many in the Media Claim It Doesn't," October 29, 2018
  2. ↑ The Heritage Foundation, "About Heritage," accessed February 10, 2020
  3. ↑ The Brennan Center, "Resources on Voter Fraud Claims," June 26, 2017
  4. ↑ The Brennan Middle, "Progressive Groups Oppose White Firm Prison Reform Neb," April 18, 2018
  5. ↑ Ballotpedia searched the database for iii terms: "deceased," "died," and "dead." Nineteen entries included voters who attempted to or did vote in a deceased person'southward name.
  6. ↑ Government Accountability Office, "About GAO," accessed December 18, 2019
  7. ↑ The Government Accountability Office wrote the post-obit about the report's methodology: "In conducting this written report, the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Sectionalisation reviewed documentation of the questioned votes, such as poll lists and voter registration records, to make up one's mind whether the questioned votes occurred as a result of clerical mistake, such every bit marking the incorrect individual as having voted, or for some other reason, such as fraud."
  8. ↑ Government Accountability Part, "Issues Related to State Voter Identification Laws," September 2014
  9. ↑ Pew stated the following about the study's methodology: "The Pew Middle on the States commissioned RTI International, a prominent nonprofit, nonpartisan research institute, to assess the quality and accuracy of land voter registration lists in the Us. RTI used a unique database maintained by Catalist, LLC, a leading aggregator and processor of voter data, to guess 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, probable due to having moved or died. An 'inaccurate' tape represents an eligible voter whose file has incorrect data. Catalist regularly updates its database for all fifty states and the District of Columbia, thus providing a sound ground for making national-level estimates of no longer valid and inaccurate records, duplicate registrations, and other important measures of listing quality. The organization buys voter lists from states and local governments, and combines that information with information from other public and commercial sources, such as the National Alter of Address database run past the U.S. Mail service, The resulting database contains a robust set of profiles of American voters and nonvoters built from registration lists and expanded upon with more data. Considering not all states provide complete records, an assay of Catalist's data probable underestimates the number of inaccurate and no longer valid records."
  10. ↑ The Pew Centre on the States, "Inaccurate, Costly, and Inefficient: Evidence That America'south Voter Registration System Needs an Upgrade," February 2012
  11. ↑ The Brennan Center for Justice, "The Truth About Voter Fraud," 2007
  12. ↑ CBS Denver, "Dying To Vote: CBS4 Investigation Finds Woman Charged With Casting Dead Father's Ballot," Nov 7, 2016
  13. ↑ Colorado Springs Gazette, "Golden woman pleads guilty to voting twice for deceased begetter," March viii, 2017
  14. ↑ The Commercial Entreatment, "Judge: Allow's Air Details of Fraud," May 22, 2007
  15. ↑ The Justice Department notes, "Half-dozen 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-24-hour interval voter registration at polling places with respect to elections for federal role."
  16. ↑ The United States Department of Justice, "The National Voter Registration Deed of 1993," accessed August xx, 2019
  17. ↑ National Briefing of State Legislatures, "Voter Listing Accuracy," Baronial 22, 2019

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