General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: 953 Dead People Voted in SC [View all]Ellipsis
(9,124 posts)January 12, 2012, 3:09 pm
By ANDREW ROSENTHAL
(snip)
Kevin Schwedo, director of the Department of Motor Vehicles, looked at the data and said he found 37,295 cases in which the person was listed as dead. Of that number, he said, 957 voted in recent elections.
If 957 people went around pretending to be a dead person in order to cast a ballot, thats fraud. But its a tiny problemsuch a minute percentage of the states 2,495,000 registered voters that its not even worth calculating. Its not in the same space-time-continuum as the potential disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of voters. And yes I know there was an 8 vote margin in the Iowa caucuses.
But we dont know enough about Mr. Schwedos statement to even reach that conclusion. Mr. Schwedo testified in the state legislature the other day that he did not know how long a period the data covered just that it was recent elections. So it could have been 957 people in the last election, or the last 10 elections.
And, to compound the problem, no one even knows if those people are actually dead, or if theyre just listed as dead in state records, which everyone seems to admit are in a terrible state. The solution here is better record keeping and regular purging of voter rolls.
http://loyalopposition.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/12/dead-voters-in-south-carolina-maybe-maybe-not/