News Munchies
Your Vote Counts ... Or Does It?
By Richard B. Barger, ABC, APR
Originally Posted
Updated
One voter? That's small potatoes!
According to a headline in The Kansas City Star, Johnson County, Kansas, in the Kansas City metro area, has decided to accept "nearly 1,500 new votes. Not all unaffiliated voters’ ballots will count."
[If you want to read the brief article -- and we suggest you not waste your time -- follow this link.]
The article says, "One voter died after casting a ballot, which prompted the election office to recommend the vote be treated as invalid."
We know, we know. One vote occasionally decides an election or issue vote ... and how tie votes are broken involves craziness in different jurisdictions (see Virginia election tie: Coin tosses, picking names in a hat? Yep, that's how some races are decided). It's just that it doesn't happen very often. And dead people voting makes a better story.
Hey, they could follow the model from Chicago, which is rumored to count the votes of hundreds of dead people, or the state of New York:
According to ballotpedia.org, when New York's Poughkeepsie Journal did a 2006 analysis of deceased people still on New York's official list of registered voters, they came up with "a final estimate of as many as 77,000 dead people on its rolls, and that as many as 2,600 of them had cast votes from the grave."
From a 2016 CBS Chicago report, "Chicago Voters Cast Ballots From Beyond The Grave" in 2016:
"Susie Sallee was buried in 1998. Yet records show she voted in Chicago 12 years later.
"Victor Crosswell died in 1994, but records show he’s voted six times since then.
"And then there’s Floyd Stevens. Records show he’s voted 11 times since his death in 1993...
"In all, the [station's] analysis showed 119 dead people have voted a total of 229 times in Chicago in the last decade."
A different example: Federal investigators once found a lazy agent, assigned to conduct personal interviews concerning applicants for government security clearances, sitting in a graveyard, "ghost writing" dummy "interviews," using the names from tombstones.
Well, at least they'll never dispute what he wrote, will they?
Anyway, we're worried about ONE voter? That seems to be small potatoes ...