Okay, so maybe some zombie voters exist.
The voting "scandal" of the week has been the
claims by South Carolina's Attorney General Alan Wilson that 900 dead people voted in "recent" elections in his state.
The New York Times columnist Andrew Rosenthal
examines the claim:
This is the story: South Carolina passed a voter ID law in 2011. The Justice Department has blocked implementation of that law, saying it will create an unconstitutional impediment to voting by certain groups.
That’s true, of course, but South Carolina officials wanted to fight the ruling, which is their right. So they set out to assemble data to bolster their case. [...]
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, that’s fraud. But it’s a tiny problem—such a minute percentage of the state’s 2,495,000 registered voters that it’s not even worth calculating. It’s not in the same space-time-continuum as the potential disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of voters. [...]
But we don’t know enough about Mr. Schwedo’s 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 they’re 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.
Think Progress has a quick rundown of a handful of previous dead voter claims, compiled by the Brennan Center, that demonstrates how rarely accusations of this kind of voter fraud ever pan out. And, as the James O'Keefe voter fraud prank proved, you can't count all your dead voters before they're buried.
In other news: