Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz said a review of the state’s voter rolls shows that none of the 8,558 dead people, in this University of Connecticut investigation, have voted.
“No dead people voted,” Bysiewicz said Wednesday. She said in many instances it was a clerical error where the local poll worker mistakenly crossed off the deceased person’s name, instead of the name of a living voter, which was one line above or below. She said a lot of the mix ups were between fathers and sons that shared the same address and the same first and last names.
Trying to put the last nail in the coffin of the dead voting issue, Bysiewicz said that of the 8,558 voters listed as active by UConn journalism students 80 percent of the deceased voters have been removed from the voter rolls.
She said 2,411 had already been removed from the active voter rolls before the report was released, 45 were still alive, 4,745 have been removed since the UConn report, and local registrars are working on verifying the death of 1,451 voters.
She said part of the problem is when someone dies in another state the information never gets back to Connecticut. She said the Department of Public Health is working with other states on sharing that information, but not all states participate in the process.
Bysiewicz thanked the University of Connecticut for helping to point out some gaps in the system. She said during the process of trying to verify the information from the report local registrars discovered some new resources, mostly Internet sites, they can use to verify death information. They also sought information from Probate Courts and burial registries.
She said local registrars verified 63 percent of the deceased voters through town documents and 37 percent were verified using newspaper obituaries, probate records, and Internet searches.
In order to prevent this from happening in the future Bysiewicz said she would conduct an annual comparison of all the states voters to the Department of Public Health master death file.
