Is mailing ballots to dead people leading to fraud?
Experts and studies say there is no evidence
Allegations of voter fraud have appeared on social media in different forms since President Donald Trump started pushing unproven voter fraud claims as early as the 2016 election. At a speech in Wisconsin on Oct. 17, 2016, then-candidate Trump said, “People that have died 10 years ago are still voting.”
As the nation considers widespread vote-by-mail during the coronavirus pandemic this election year, users on social media are claiming dead voters are receiving ballots and raising concerns about fraud.
A Facebook post in June that has since been deleted read, “So my Mom who passed 7yrs ago and my sister passed 12 yrs ago can still vote. There will be no fraud in November. Please! Smh.” The post, which had more than 2,700 shares before being removed, also showed a photo of two alleged mail-in ballots.
USA TODAY requested a comment from that user, but did not hear back.
The election fraud claim has also made the rounds on Twitter. A tweet from last month reads, “Today you have to ID to even get social security!! The only reason Democrats don’t want ID is because they want illegals, the dead and felons to be able to vote.”
In a 2012 assessment in the Social Science Quarterly of Georgia’s election in 2006, researchers found “no evidence that election fraud was committed under the auspices of deceased registrants.”
The role of signatures
Experts: No evidence
The Help America Vote Act of 2002 encouraged states to improve voter registration lists and audit election results to have better accuracy. Lorraine Minnite, a political science professor at Rutgers University and author of “The Myth of Voter Fraud,“told USA TODAY that dead people being able to vote is a myth.
“There could be a short period of time in which if you took a snapshot of a (voter registration) list there might be some names of people on there who have died yesterday or died last week,” Minnite said. “It takes election officials a little bit of time to sort those things out.”
She said people who claim that dead people can vote are referencing voting registration lists, which is misleading because election officials regularly clean up such lists. Some states do it more vigorously and frequently.
Minnite added that, on occasion, there will be cases where an elderly couple will vote by mail ahead of the election, and a week before an election they die without the election official knowing, but that this is in no way “threatening to the integrity of an election.”
That was echoed by Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor of government at Harvard University and an expert in elections, who told USA TODAY that voter files are updated by county officials regularly. But he said that in any given year, it is possible for a fraction of people to either move or die. He added that almost every election office uses national change-of-address information and other data to identify those people and update files.
He said that even if a dead person is sent a ballot, signature requirements are another round of fraud protections, noting that many county election officials have discarded ballots due to nonmatching signatures.
“Occasionally, there are cases where somebody orders an absentee ballot and passes away, and then a relative goes ahead and votes that ballot,” Ansolabehere said.
Kim Wyman, Washington’s secretary of state, told the New York Times that in cases of votes by dead people, election officials found that a spouse had just died and that the survivor wanted to cast one last ballot in their name.
Recently, in part of a mass mailing of absentee ballot applications in Michigan on May 19, it was found that applications were being sent to dead people, the Detroit News reported. But experts said the mailings aren’t a cause for concern and can actually help the state update its voting rolls.
Tracy Wimmer, a spokeswoman for Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, told the Detroit News that forging a signature is a crime and is “rarely attempted” and that people can mark the ballot as “moved” or “deceased.” By doing so, the state is able to improve its voter list.
The National Conference of State Legislature’s site says, “When the ballot is returned to the election office, election officials have a process for examining each and every signature and comparing it to other documents in their files that contains the voter signature – usually the voter registration record.”
The signature match is done by election officials who are sometimes assisted by technology and working in bipartisan teams during the process. In some states, individuals go through training to analyze potential voting fraud. If a discrepancy is found, voters are offered an opportunity to provide more verification before election officials decide not to count the ballot.
A recent case study by Stanford Law School on California’s Every Vote Counts Act found that many counties there have been hesitant to shift toward automatic signature scanners due to concerns over accuracy. When a signature does not match, a voter is contacted via mail and often as well by phone and email; some counties use SMS messaging or Facebook to notify voters an additional time. In Wisconsin’s April 7 primary, 14,000 absentee ballots cast were rejected because they lacked witness signatures, NPR reported.
A 2016 study by researchers at Dartmouth focused on noncitizen populations, dead people, timing of results and voting technology. They found no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election nor any striking abnormalities in states flagged as potentially problematic.
In a report called “The politics of voter fraud” by Minnite, a case was analyzed in which claims of voter fraud appeared after a story headlined “In Mich. Even Dead Vote, From Holland to Detroit, votes were cast by 132 dead people.” A full reading of the article revealed that the voting irregularities were not attributed to voter fraud, but rather, clerical errors.
Similarly, in 2005, the New Jersey Republican State Committee claimed it found evidence of 4,755 dead people having voted. But an analysis of the data the RSC provided to the state found that the errors were rooted in methodological problems in the RSC’s list matching techniques, such as excluding middle initials and suffixes, which resulted in duplicate records and mismatches of people presumed to be the same person.
In a 2012 assessment in the Social Science Quarterly of Georgia’s election in 2006, researchers found “no evidence that election fraud was committed under the auspices of deceased registrants.” In a 2007 report, “The Truth About Voter Fraud” from the liberal Brennan Center of Justice, Justin Levitt wrote, “Voting from the grave offers salacious headlines, and investigators often attempt to match death records to voter rolls in an attempt to produce purported evidence of fraud.”
Levitt found that false claims surrounding dead people voting is due to “flawed matches of lists from one place (death records) to another (voter rolls).” After analyzing five different widespread reports of “dead voters,” he found all of them to be exaggerated or unfounded.
It is true that dead voters may still be receiving ballots, however, those ballots may be marked as “deceased” to update voter lists and a voter’s signature is required to match on the ballot in order for it to count.
Experts have said these cases are possible but rare.
The claim that these cases lead to voter fraud is unproved.