It turns out the claims of 953 votes by dead people actually involved not one election but 74 elections over a seven-year period.
So SLED’s investigation centered on 207 votes that allegedly were made by dead people in the Nov. 2, 2010 election — when a total of 1,365,480 votes were cast — after officials concluded that that batch constituted a “representative sampling” of the alleged voting irregularities. (Note that the number of alleged dead votes was less than 2/10,000th of all of the votes cast in that election.)
The report confirms what the State Election Commission had found after preliminarily examining some of the allegations: The so-called votes by dead people were the result of clerical errors or mistaken identities.
For instance, sometimes a son had the same name as a deceased father, and poll workers mixed up a dead father with a living son. (This happened 92 times in the initial probe, and then further investigation found seven more examples.)
In 56 cases, there was “bad data matching,” in which the DMV records had the Social Security of a dead person associated with a living voter. The living voter — with a different name and birth date — properly cast a ballot. Thirty-two votes attributed to dead people were simply the result of too-sensitive scanners.
In one case, someone cast an absentee ballot before dying; their vote still counts under the law. In two other cases, people requested an absentee ballot, but died before returning it, so no harm was done. In other cases, the wrong voter was marked as having cast a vote, and then the marks were not completely erased. There were several other types of clerical errors, too numerous to mention. In the end, just five votes remained unresolved after extensive investigation.
In other words, there were not “hundreds” of zombie voters — just egg on the face of the politicians who promoted these “facts” across national television. So do they have any regrets?
