Anthrocide

In trying to lend justification to the President’s delusional assertion that there were millions of votes cast illegally during the most recent election — and therefore that election reform is needed — his defenders cite the presence on voter rolls of registrants who are dead or are registered in more than one state. I worked for the Missouri Secretary of State’s office for 12 years and was very much involved in the processes used to keep voter rolls as clean as possible. So, are there deceased people on voter rolls? Absolutely. Are there voters on the rolls of more than one state? Certainly. Does this mean that the entire system is flawed, needs an overhaul, and that voter fraud is rampant because of these circumstances? DEFINITELY NOT.

Let us apply a bit of rationality to all this, and take a practical look at each situation, shall we? First, dead voters. Believe it or not, the very first thing that happens when a person passes away is NOT for someone to notify the deceased’s Local Election Authority (LEA) that he or she needs to be removed from the voter rolls. Except where a rural county’s clerk actually knew the deceased, or where the LEA checks the obituaries against the voter rolls, they usually are unaware of a voter’s death. Then how do these voters get removed? Missouri used several methods. First, we did computerized matches against death records from the Dept. of Health & Sr. Svcs. This is not foolproof, however. If the individual died out of state, DHSS would not necessarily be informed. Next, there were matches against the Social Security Administration’s master death database. This helped but, since the decedent’s address may have been different when he/she died than what was on their registration, and we have only the last four digits of SSN, matching could be problematic.

Indeed, automated matching is not as slick as you might hope. A person who registers to vote by filling-out a registration card by hand simply gives or mails it to the election authority and leaves them to enter their data into the registration system. Oops, there’s a few stray marks on this card. Is that birthdate 1/8/1990 or 7/8/1990? Is that Ken Smith or Kim Smith? Our registration software ran SSN and Driver’s License checks against the data when entered, but if the SSN and/or DL was left blank the law requires the assumption to be that the individual does not have one. If the DL was from another state, no matching was done. And, of course, if “Kim Smith” was short for “Kimberly Smith” automated name matching would be less than exact. Furthermore, even SSA’s data can often be many months late in reporting a death. Add to all this that the matching, etc., did NOT remove voters. For safety’s sake, the match created lists that were sent back to the LEAs who then were to verify the matching data and then mark the registrants as deceased in the system — a task that becomes secondary during the crunch of preparing for an election. After a voter misses two federal general elections, they “age off” the voter rolls, so even a record that slips through the cracks will eventually be disabled. Nevertheless, at any given point in time even the most diligent LEAs will have a fair number of deceased voters on their rolls and, statewide, that number could be in the thousands. Does their presence mean voter fraud is occurring? Not at all.

Suppose you read a random obituary before an election and decide that, despite the risk of being convicted of a federal crime, you’re going to vote both as yourself and the dead person. Was he even registered? What polling place would he have voted at? Can you be sure the LEA hasn’t already removed him from the rolls? You have to sign the precinct register (or electronic equivalent), will your signature match? A wrong guess on any of these and you’re in danger of time in Leavenworth. All so you can vote ONE extra vote? And people are claiming this equates to MILLIONS of illegal votes? Give me a break.

But, what of multi-state registrants? When my wife and I left California for Missouri with two cars, a dog, and the few odds and ends that didn’t go on the moving van, we did not stop off at our LEA and notify them that we were moving to another state so they could remove us from the voter rolls. Nobody does. There is a place on the Missouri voter registration form to tell where you used to be registered, but if you leave it blank nothing happens — they just assume you’re a first-time voter. Even if you fill it in, the result is a list that eventually gets sent to the old state’s State Election Authority who then, hopefully, forwards it to the appropriate LEA who, when they get around to it, will mark that registration disabled. Then, there are multi-state automated matches that produce lists of suspected duplicates that the LEAs are given to process, but not all 50 states. Only those nearby. Since Drivers Licenses are subject to the same issue (obtaining one in the new state must cause the old state to be notified and nullify the old license), matching was done against DMV records. Still, all these matching efforts suffer the same uncertainties as described previously. Once again, what is the likelihood that a significant number of people are moronic enough to risk conviction of a felony so they can vote once in their old state and a second time in their current state? If a person tries to vote in the old state and they’ve already removed him, he’s busted.

Could a given state have a few hundred people gutsy and/or dimwitted enough to vote via one of these illegal methods? Perhaps. But even if each state had 1,000 people do so, that would not have changed the election results. If there was any significant voter fraud, it was not because of multi-state registrations or deceased people on the voter rolls. So any hair-on-fire demand for an election process overhaul in response to the existence of deceased or multi-state registrants will be a huge waste of time and money solving a non-problem.