Just in time for Halloween! I guess the question would be, did they fill out their own ballot before they expired? It's the Zombies again!----The Webmistress
October 27, 2004
"I’m comfortable with saying that’s a possibility," Terry Jarrett, chief legal counsel for Secretary of State Matt Blunt, said yesterday.
It’s actually likely, said county clerks interviewed yesterday. The clerks are in charge of running elections in jurisdictions large and small.
"We check it against the newspaper obituaries, but I don’t know of any way to be 100 percent sure that every absentee is alive on Election Day," Oregon County Clerk Gary Hensley said from his office in Alton, in southern Missouri. "Many of the absentees do tend to be older or sick folks, and they do pass away. That they are sick, that’s why many vote absentee in the first place."
For six weeks before Election Day, Missouri allows absentee voting for specific reasons, including illness and inability to get to polling places. This year, there has been a surge in requests for absentee ballots, caused in part by efforts to gather votes from senior citizens, the hospitalized and shut-ins.
The law also requires that absentee ballots be rejected "if sufficient evidence is shown to an election authority" that the voter died before polls open on Election Day.
The subject is delicate for election officials, but they acknowledge that life expectancy tables might not be generous to these voters.
State vital records show that an average of about 151 voting-age Missourians died every day in 2003. Based on 2003’s numbers, more than 6,200 voting-age Missourians could die during the six-week absentee balloting period.
But officials don’t dependably know how many absentee voters die between casting their ballots and Election Day because mailed updates of state death records can run several weeks behind.
For example, Christian County Clerk Kay Brown said her staff yesterday was working from the most recent state-provided list of dead people - but it was only current through August.
Absentee voting started Sept. 21.
Christian County has been among the fastest-growing in population, mostly because of newly retired senior citizens moving to the Ozarks.
"I personally know at least two absentee voters who are in hospice care, and their minds are clear and they know what they want when they vote," Brown said, "but who knows if they will be alive Election Day?"
Local election officials said their effectiveness at throwing out absentee votes from dead people is tied to the diligence of their staffs.
In Camden County, around the retiree-heavy Lake of the Ozarks, County Clerk Rowland Todd said about 2,200 absentee ballots were requested as of yesterday. His staff scours newspaper obituaries daily and has arranged for direct alerts about deaths from local funeral homes.
"The list from the state just arrives too late, so even with our good local effort, there is no doubt some dead absentees will be counted, especially in high-population areas," Todd said.
Buchanan County Clerk Pat Conway said from St. Joseph that he has already received absentee ballots from three people his staff members found to have died since they asked for the paperwork.
"We check the obituaries every morning, and that local initiative is by far the best way to catch it," Conway said. "But we have 895 people on our local listing as being unable to get to the polls, and most are elderly, so it’s not surprising some will not make it to Nov. 2."
In St. Louis County, where perhaps 40,000 absentee ballots could be cast, Republican Elections Director David Welch said there is "simply no way" to stay current on absentee voter deaths in the days before the election, but "we try to catch as many as we can."