Bysiewicz:

No Dead People Voted

HARTFORD (AP) — A review of the state’s voter rolls shows that no dead people are “voting” in Connecticut, but there are problems in making sure the rolls are accurate, Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz said Wednesday.

Ms Bysiewicz said a canvass being conducted by the state’s voter registrars has not turned up any evidence that anyone has deliberately tried to steal the identity of a dead person and vote in their name. There have been some clerical errors, however, where someone dead was erroneously marked off as having voted.

In those cases, she said, it often involved people in the same family with the same names. According to Newtown Democratic Registrar LeReine Frampton, her office discovered one such situation where a local father and son with the same name down to the middle initial were switched on the voting list after the father died.

“We still had the father on the list and dropped the son,” Ms Frampton told The Newtown Bee following the press conference.

That issue was subsequently corrected.

The review of voter rolls stems from a recent investigation conducted by a group of University of Connecticut journalism students. Their report, which was made public in a newspaper report April 20, determined 8,558 dead people appeared on voter rolls across the state.

Local registrars across the state have spent the past month tracking down those people. To date, 4,745 voters have been verified as dead and removed from the rolls.

They are still trying to verify before the November election whether a remaining 1,451 people are dead. Those names will then be moved to the inactive voter list.

Often local registrars, who receive monthly death notices for all citizens over age 17, are not getting the most up-to-date information, Ms Bysiewicz said. In some cases, a voter may die in another state and his or her family does not inform officials in the person’s hometown.

“That needs to be fixed, either through legislation or through our state’s Department of Health, working with other states to share information,” Ms Bysiewicz said.

Although there is an interstate compact to share death information, not all states participate, she said. That means Connecticut may not find out about someone who dies in a nursing home, for example, located in another state.

So far, 45 of the names on the UConn students’ list have been found alive. Karen Doyle Lyons, registrar of voters in Norwalk, said she found five people, including one man whose wife told election officials that her husband is “a little wobbly, but he’s still kicking.”

Newtown Bee Associate Editor John Voket contributed to this report.