Ha! I joke, but sometimes people get so rooted to an opinion they're not even sure what point they're making any more.
That's certainly true, and reminds me of why I don't tend to frequent this forum.
The guy waving his Sharpie pen around is shocked, shocked to learn there are dead people on registered voter rolls.
Well, yeah, there are dead people with Facebook accounts too, and for the same reason.
There is not some "dead people fairy" who goes around and closes your online accounts, takes you off the voter rolls, hands in your driver's license, terminates your domain registrations, or cancels your trademark registrations either.
This was a hallmark of Kris Kobach's "voter fraud" effort that was based on some really weird assumptions. For example, a few years back they were going on about running a "cross check" of voter registrations because - now brace yourself for this - there are thousands of people registered to vote in more than one state.
Yes, of course there are. People move. When someone moves from Kansas to California, they don't ring up the election board in Kansas to say, "I've moved to California, please remove me." Literally
NOBODY does that. Have you ever done that?
So Kobach and his buddies behind the "multi state cross check" project wanted to take lists of registered voters' names, including every "John Smith" and "Robert Davis", and remove them from all states where they popped up as "registered in more than one state".
A lot of election systems will simply delete the registration if the voter doesn't vote in N elections, where N can vary among states. But, sure, at any given time, there are people who live in California who are still registered to vote in Kansas. "Are they voting in Kansas?" is, of course, a more relevant question.
And that's where we come to the mythical "dead person fairy" who is supposed to go around removing dead people from voter rolls.
Ask yourself, if you've ever been in a position of responsibility when someone died. What did you do to get them "unregistered to vote". Do you call up the election board and say, "Jim Jones is dead, please remove him from the voter roll"?
Well, of course not. They aren't going to "unregister" someone simply because some person calls or shows up claiming that a registered voter is dead.
But, I'll tell you, in more than two decades of legal practice in a firm and on my own and having dealt with plenty of estate issues, nobody has
EVER said, "Oh, yeah, we gotta get the deceased person unregistered to vote."
Because who gives a shit? Are you going to either show up to vote with fake ID, or are you going to intercept the mail at their former address and then forge an affidavit with a mismatching signature and commit a federal crime simply to cast one dead guy's vote?
Think about how much work that would be, to apply for, intercept, fill out, and return, without any problems, tens of thousands of these "dead people votes". Seriously sit down and go through all the steps you'd have to follow.
There is no such person as the 'dead people fairy' who unregisters dead people. After a while, the registration will drop. The relevant question is "Is that dead person actually voting, as opposed to simply existing as an entry in the registration system?"
So, here's what some people do. Just like the abandoned "multi state cross check" scheme, you start with a list of registered voters. Then you scarf down data from something like the Social Security Death Index. Now, a lot of people do not understand the purpose of the SSDI, and I'm not going into it today. But, long story short, it is not a list of "all the people who have died" (which was a common misunderstanding of certain 9/11 conspiracy types who didn't find all the victims in it). But I digress...
So, these people have taken a list of names from the SSDI which doesn't include all of the information needed to match a voter record, and done a name check match.
So, yes, if there are five generations of Vincent Testarotta living in South Philadelphia (and it's a name I just made up, but probably corresponds to at least five guys on Passyunk Avenue alone), and one of them is dead, these nitwits are calling it a match to any Vincent Testarotta who might be registered to vote.
They actually ran this scam about a year ago, and have brought it back for a second run as a lawsuit. The upshot the last time they ran this one was that the results fell into two buckets - "yes, there are dead people registered to vote, who are not voting" and "yes, there are people who have the same name as a dead person, but they are not dead, and they are registered to vote".
This then comes back to "Well, gosh, they need to fix that!" As pointed out on another one of these silly canards, governments have limited funds to spend. If there were an appreciable instance of dead people actually voting, then it would be worth spending money to set up some kind of death certificate indexing system.
However, that too will not be complete.
Your death certificate is issued by the state where you die, which may not be the state where you live. If I go to Florida on vacation and get eaten by a shark, my death certificate will be issued by the county in Florida where I died. They aren't going to ring up the Delaware election department and check my voter registration status. So, as you can probably tell, the "dead people registered to vote" is also a subset of the "people who moved away and remain registered to vote" class of registrations.
If you get nothing out of this, the easy takeaway is that if you thought it was somehow "surprising" that there are dead people registered to vote, then you have not really though much about what happens - and what does not happen - when people die.
And if you have no experience or familiarity with the clerical consequences of 'what happens when people die', then maybe you aren't in the best position to understand why dead people being registered to vote is a normal thing in every voter registration system in every state in the country.
Carry on...
