Zombies will not steal the election from Trump

Some in my “Pensacola Speaks” radio audience are convinced that dead people will be voting in this year’s presidential election, and all those votes will be for Hillary Clinton.

Trump has repeatedly told his supporters that the election is rigged against him. He has claimed, “People that have died 10 years ago are still voting.”

He has quoted a Pew Research Report, “Inaccurate, Costly and Inefficient: Evidence That America’s Voter Registration System Needs and Upgrade”, that stated approximately 24 million people — one out of every eight — voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or significantly inaccurate.

Trump said. “More than 1.8 million deceased individuals, right now, are listed as voters.’

He implied that those 1.8 million have had, or will have, votes cast in their names. “…I have a feeling they’re not gonna vote for me. Of the 1.8 million, 1.8 million is voting for someone else.”

However, Trump didn’t read the entire report because it did not find that 1.8 million deceased people ever actually voted. Instead, the researchers used the statistic to point to the need to upgrade voter registration systems.

To help us understand the risk of zombie votes, we turned to FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania (APPC). Funded by endowments and grants from the Annenberg Foundation and the Flora Family Foundation, as well as private, individual donations, APPC is non-partisan and does not accept, directly or indirectly, any funds from corporations, unions, partisan organizations or advocacy groups.

FactCheck.org interviewed Lorraine Minnite, a professor at Rutgers University and author of “The Myth of Voter Fraud.” She concluded in her book that while voting irregularities produced by the fragmented and complex nature of the electoral process in the United States are common, incidents of deliberate voter fraud are actually quite rare.

Minnite told FactCheck.org that dead people voting isn’t a problem. Further investigation into such claims have found them to be mostly either clerical errors or the person voted early but died before the election date.

To verify their voter rolls, a number of states compared their voter lists to the Social Security Death Index. In some cases, the comparison turned up lists of apparent instances of “dead people” voting. With a bit of digging, almost all of those turned out to be due to clerical errors or as a result of people who legally voted via absentee ballots or the early voting process but later died before Election Day, Minnite said.

In 2012 South Carolina’s attorney general notified the U.S. Department of Justice of potential voter fraud after finding 953 ballots cast in the 2010 election by voters listed as deceased, in some cases as long as six years.

The State Election Commission investigated a sample of 207 cases from the 2010 election:

• 106 cases were the result of clerical errors by poll managers.

o 91 cases were name recognition errors such as marking the deceased John Doe, Sr. as voting when John Doe, Jr. actually voted
o In 6 cases, the poll manager apparently began marking incorrect voter, realized mistake, but did not erase the original marks
o In 5 cases, election officials marked the wrong voter as voting absentee
o In 3 cases, election officials issued the absentee application in the wrong name

•  56 cases were the result of bad data matching. In these cases, it appears DMV used only the voter’s social security number to match against the death file. The voters’ names and dates of birth in these cases do not match the names and dates of birth in the death file. In these cases, there is no indication that the voter is deceased.

•  32 cases were voter participation errors. Voter registration lists marked by poll managers are scanned electronically to record voter participation in each election. Stray marks on the lists and the sensitivity of the automatic scanner can lead to voters erroneously being given credit for voting in an election. In all of these cases, there is no corroborative information on voter registration lists, poll lists, or absentee applications indicating the voter actually voted.

•  3 cases were the result of absentee ballots being issued to a voter, who then died before Election Day.

•  10 cases had insufficient information in the record to make a determination:

o In 7 cases, the signature on the poll list could not be matched to another voter o In 2 cases, the poll list is missing making it impossible to match the signature to another person
o In 1 case, the signature on the poll list seems to match a voter in another precinct but could not be verified.

When he worked for the Brennan Center for Justice, Justin Levitt examined several claims of dead people voting in a 2007 report, “The Truth About Voter Fraud.”  Levitt is currently on leave from his professorship at the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. He is serving as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.

These are his findings:

• In Georgia in 2000, 5,412 votes were alleged to have been cast by deceased voters over the past 20 years.91 e allegations were premised on a awed match of voter rolls to death lists. A follow-up report clari ed that only one instance had been substantiated, and this single instance was later found to have been an error: the example above, in which Alan J. Mandel was confused with Alan J. Mandell.92 No other evidence of fraudulent votes was reported.

• In Michigan in 2005, 132 votes were alleged to have been cast by deceased voters.93 e allega- tions were premised on a awed match of voter rolls to death lists. A follow-up investigation by the Secretary of State revealed that these alleged dead voters were actually absentee ballots mailed to voters who died before Election Day; 97 of these ballots were never voted, and 27 were voted before the voter passed away.94 Even if the remaining eight cases all revealed sub- stantiated fraud, that would amount to a rate of at most 0.0027%.95

• In New Jersey in 2004, 4,755 deceased voters were alleged to have cast a ballot. e allegations were premised on a awed match of voter rolls to death lists. No follow-up investigation publicly documented any substantiated cases of fraud of which we are aware, and there were no reports that any of these allegedly deceased voters voted in 2005.96

• In New York in 2002 and 2004, 2,600 deceased voters were alleged to have cast a ballot, again based on a match of voter rolls to death lists. Journalists following up on seven cases found cleri- cal errors and mistakes but no fraud, and no other evidence of fraud was reported.97

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Inweekly Conclusion: Zombies aren’t going to interfere with 2016 presidential election