Election breathes new life into false ‘dead voter’ claims
As President Donald Trump continued to assert without evidence Tuesday that the presidential election was undermined by voter fraud, social media users falsely claimed that people had cast extra votes using the identities of dead people in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
There’s no evidence that this happened.
The false claim that deceased voters cast votes “comes up every election,” said Jason Roberts, a professor of political science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Experts told The Associated Press that it is common for state voter rolls to include voters with birthdates that make them appear impossibly old, but these are usually explained by human error, software quirks or voter confidentiality issues.
Here’s a closer look at this dubious claim:
• Claim: Dead people in Pennsylvania and Michigan voted in the 2020 presidential election.
• The facts: There is no proof of foul play involving deceased voters in the election, according to officials in both states.
One tweet that repeated the false claim stated: “These are some of the people who voted in #PA...840 were 101 years old or older, 39 lived through the Civil War, 45 were born in the 1800s.” The tweet had over 18,000 retweets.
“A similar complaint was brought before a PA court — and soundly rejected,” the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General said in a statement. “The court found no deficiency in how PA maintains its voter rolls, and there is currently no proof provided that any deceased person has voted in the 2020 election.”
There was one incident in Luzerne County where a registered Republican reportedly attempted to apply for an absentee ballot in his deceased mother’s name, but he didn’t make it past the application phase. “This case is more proof our election will be protected by state and local officials alike,” Attorney General Josh Shapiro tweeted in October.
After social media users circulated videos that purportedly showed the names of dead voters in Michigan, The AP contacted one of the people named. She was very much alive and had just beaten her husband at cribbage.
According to experts, seeing strange birthdates on voter rolls that appear to belong to deceased registrants isn’t evidence of voter fraud, and there are multiple reasons why it can occur.