Legal controversy over dead absentee voters if we need a recount

[HeldsBelds]

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/politics/10057061.htm

In Florida alone, 1.5 million people, many of them elderly and sick retirees who can't make it to the polls, requested absentee ballots allowing them to vote more than a month early. And hundreds of thousands more have already voted early in person in the past two weeks. How many of those voters won't be alive on Election Day? Considering that an average of 455 voting-age people die in Florida every day, and that the 2000 presidential election was decided by a mere 537 votes, dead votes that slip through the cracks could become a meaningful bloc.

"There are lots of examples of elections being decided by one vote or 300 votes, as in New Mexico in 2000," said Tim Storey, a senior fellow with National Conference of State Legislatures in Denver. "It's the classic policymaking dilemma when you're trying to embark on new methods like early voting." The problem has arisen as an unintended consequence of laws meant to prevent a repeat of the 2000 presidential election debacle. Unlike traditional mail-in absentee ballots that are stored in labeled envelopes and can be pulled if someone dies, most of the new "in-person" early voting is being done on machines with no paper ballot to tell how those people voted.

So if a person in Florida casts an early ballot, then is run over by a truck right outside the polling place, there's no way to rescind the vote. But the vote of a Florida soldier who mails an absentee ballot from Iraq, then is killed in action, won't - or shouldn't - be counted. "You've got potentially two people with exactly the same situation being treated differently under the law," said John Green, director of the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at The University of Akron in Ohio. "And on the face of it, that's unfair."

[Rainbowreflect]

1. If a vote is legally cast & the person dies before the vote is

counted it should still be counted, period. Should not matter how or where.

[blondeatlast]

2. Yeah, but you can bet there are reThugs combing vital statistics

records even as we speak, er, type...

[Rainbowreflect]

3. You are probably right, but I'm sure the first thing they are looking

at is D or R. IMHO

[phish420]

4. The law in florida states the person has to be alive

on election day, because the ballot can not be technically 'cast' until then...so no matter when you cast it, it is not counted until election day, which is the only day that is the actual 'election'...it is pretty clear in FL that these votes won't count...I happen to agree with this.

[exsoccermom]

5. You would think that "equal treatment" would require that any vote

legally cast would have to be counted. There is no consistent way to account for deaths across all voters. Overseas voters who die after sending in their ballot are not going to be reported back to the state (or in a timely fashion). Absentee voters are often out of state--are their deaths going to be reported back to their home state? It just seems that it is not possible to consistently identify voters who have died prior to election day. Ergo, casting out the ballots of some late voters would result in unequal treatment for other late voters whose ballots were counted. This is really a depressing thread.