Dead Man Voting
Reading Barry Pruett’s March 18 article in Sierra Thread on Election Integrity reminded me of an experience I had about three years ago. My sister, a Placer County resident and registered voter, died in January 2021. Shortly thereafter I received a notice from Placer County Elections that her name had been removed from the voter rolls. My sister was living in a nursing home in Auburn, but her mail came to my address in Nevada County. I remember how surprised and impressed I was that an elections office was so on top of things that they would almost immediately clean up their voter rolls and go through the trouble of letting next of kin know.
Barry Pruett’s experience with his deceased in-laws appears to be quite messy and may involve as many as three California counties (El Dorado, Sacramento, and Nevada). I decided to investigate the procedures of both Placer and Nevada counties to see if I could shed any light on why Barry received a dead person’s ballot and I didn’t. To that end, I recently talked to a Placer County Elections staffer and told her how impressed I was that I had received a notice so quickly after my sister’s death. How did you do it? She told me that they have a pipeline from the California Department of Public Health. The Elections office checks the statistics on a weekly basis and removes dead people from their voter rolls. Simple. Efficient. Easy.
Then I spoke with a Nevada County Elections staffer and heard quite a different story. Apparently they don’t check statistics from the Department of Public Health, but instead rely on next of kin to send them death certificates in order to have a dead person removed from the voter rolls. Relying on next of kin to mail a death certificate to an Elections office seems like an inefficient and burdensome responsibility, particularly since California Department of Public Health data is so readily available. What if there is no next of kin? What if the next of kin doesn’t have the wherewithal to contact the Elections Office. We know that the Social Security Administration and banks are automatically notified when someone dies. Social Security checks are halted and bank accounts are frozen. Why can’t each California county enact procedures that solve the problem of dead people voting?
I further asked the Nevada County Elections staffer what would happen if a dead person’s ballot was filled in fraudulently. She replied that signature matching would catch the problem. I probed deeper and asked what would happen if the fraudulent voter had an example of the dead person’s signature and forged their signature. She replied that it was a federal offense to do so (and presumably that would be a sufficient deterrent to prevent someone from doing this).
This is just one small example of the absolute MESS that results from mailing ballots to seemingly anyone and everyone in California. I have anecdotal evidence of people receiving two ballots and even illegal aliens receiving ballots in Nevada County. In one case, the illegal alien was scared off from voting because he knew he could get into trouble.
I do acknowledge that each voter is responsible to some degree for the integrity of their own voter status. If I moved I would notify the county immediately to let them know. I wouldn’t want my ballot going to the wrong address. That’s on me. I was raised to believe that my right to vote is sacrosanct.
Why are conservatives so concerned with election integrity you may ask. Are we just mean? Don’t we support democracy? Are we trying to deny the right to vote to certain groups we don’t like or we think won’t vote the way we do? Certainly not!
The right to vote is SACRED and ought to be respected and held to the highest standards possible. In my lifetime (I first voted in the 1970s), I have seen this once beautiful system devolve into a sloppy, dishonest, chaotic system fraught with so many opportunities to cheat that we no longer have confidence in election results.
Surely we can combine some of the innovations that enable higher voter turnout rates (i.e. voters aren’t restricted to one small precinct location) with the more tried and true common sense methods that ensure vote integrity (i.e. requiring voter ID, shortening the voting window down from a whole month to a shorter period, eliminating drop boxes and ballot harvesting, sending mail-in ballots only to people who request them), in order to create a system that everyone can have confidence in.
It seems that liberals live in a Pollyanna world where everyone is honest and to suspect cheating is a conspiracy theory. Conservations, on the other hand, understand “the nature of man” as Barry Pruett puts it. Evil does exist. Sure, the vast majority of people are honest, but there are those who believe “the ends justify the means.” Cheating is justified if you believe your opponent is Hitler. Talk about conspiracy theories!