The real reason no one impersonates dead voters: High risk, little benefit

[FreakinDJ]

David Rothschild | The Signal

In an effort to demonstrate that the specter of voting fraud in America is real, the conservative agitator James O'Keefe and his group Project Veritas recently sent a handful of people into a voting center during the New Hampshire primary to obtain ballots on behalf of dead registered voters. (You may remember O'Keefe as the guy who dressed as a "pimp" in an undercover ACORN sting, or who made so much trouble for NPR.) Several were successful, as a selectively edited video from Project Veritas spoon-fed to the Daily Caller demonstrates.

The trend throughout the United States is to enact new laws that will make photo IDs a prerequisite for participating in the democratic process. Proponents of voter ID laws use voting in lieu of dead people as the main example of fraud, while opponents point out that there is no evidence of widespread fraud and significant evidence that such laws make it more difficult for students and those in lower-income brackets to vote. Lawmakers in South Carolina used the accusation that 957 dead people voted in the "recent elections" as proof of the need for voter ID laws—a claim the New York Times' Andrew Rosenthal points out is very poorly supported. (The Justice Department has blocked the measure in South Carolina, so voters on Saturday will not need a photo ID to vote.)

Voter ID laws do not stop people who have fraudulently registered as themselves. The vast majority of these cases are people who believed themselves to be eligible, notably felons that do not know they are ineligible to vote in a given state. States that bar felons, such as Florida, have traditionally been so vigilant in blocking felons that thousands of eligible voters have been inadvertently purged from the voter rolls in the state's fixation to ensure that felons do not vote. Nor would these laws stop non-citizens from voting as themselves. (Even so, investigations have found voting by non-citizens to be extremely rare; a study of 370,000 votes cast in Milwaukee from 1992-2000 showed 4 votes by non-citizens.)

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/signal/real-reason-no-one-impersonates-dead-voters-high-155606178.html

[eridani]

1. With mail-in balloting you can do that, but only once

You have to be able to fake your dead spouse's signature (and if you can't do that after 40+ years, are you really married?), and get the ballot posted before the death notice comes out. The fall-back assumption is generally that the now dead person voted before dying. Wait too long, and the postmark will get the ballot scuttled. The database will have been updated before the next election.

[Louisiana1976]

2. What about the stories about dead people "voting"

in Chicago in the Kennedy election?

[provis99]

3. and the stories of the dead Californians voting for Nixon?

Nixon never pressed the Kennedy campaign, because he was cheating more than they were.

[pinboy3niner]

4. And besides, the corpse makeup takes so long to put on...

...and getting it off is a bitch!

[loyalsister]

5. At least as ridiculous

is the claim that undocumented immigrants will try to vote. The last thing they want to do is call attention to themselves in an official exercise related to the government they are hiding from.