Now Is The Time To End 'Dead Suffrage' - Commentary

A UConn advanced-reporting journalism class investigated Connecticut state voting records last semester and found that over 300 dead people appeared to have voted in elections since 1994. Obviously, no dead people actually voted in the elections, but votes were attributed to citizens who were not only deceased, but should not have even been listed in the active voter rolls. Some cities had upwards of 30 dead voters, with as many as 17 votes cast per person. There were a few instances where people who were registered to vote had no voting history until after their deaths. One woman was listed on the active voter roll last November, despite the fact that she had died in 1979.The most troublesome part of these findings, however, is that over 8,500 people who are listed as dead are still registered to vote in Connecticut and until this week no one at the state level was investigating why.In November 2006, Joe Courtney won the Connecticut second district Congressional race by 91 votes. That is a small enough number that people voting under the wrong name could have significantly altered the outcome.Instead of placing the burden of maintaining the voter registration database onto local town registrars, the state should take the initiative to rectify this problem by removing people from the voter registration database once the information is passed onto the Department of Public Health or Social Security Administration and put on one of the master death lists. The state has been hesitant to take control of maintaining the voter database because it wants to make sure that people are not being arbitrarily removed from the voter list. The state rightly does not want to disenfranchise voters by faultily turning people away from the voting booths because they were removed by mistake, so the responsibility has been left to town registrars, who are more familiar with town residents. It would make sense to have someone maintain the database locally, if that person removed people...