"The Official Portrait of Miss InDiana"

"The Official Portrait of Miss InDiana"
aka "Miss Victory"

Friday, October 10, 2008

DOCUMENTED POST MORTEM VOTER IN HOUSTON

image from Texas Watchdog

Although she voted all her life and died 10 months before the Houston primary, the late Gloria Guidry cast her vote in March. Channel 2 in Houston has the report. Citizens in Texas are alarmed because there are more than 4,000 registered voters who are now deceased.

The well organized Texas Watchdog Group has more details.

1 comment:

Paul K. Ogden said...

The problem is the rules make it very difficult to purge people anymore. The feds wrongly got involved in the issue and did what they normally did...screw things up.

There is a solution. The law should say if someone doesn't vote a single time in a 4 year period, purge them. That takes care of the problem with the bloated voter registration rolls. It takes 5 minutes to register. If you vote one time in a 4 year period, you don't even have to spend that 5 minutes.

The problem is the federal law won't let states do that anymore. Now you have to try to go through an expensive and time-consuming confirmation process to confirm non-voters have moved or died. Many Clerk's Offices don't have the time or the manpower to do that. And it generally produces a poor effort anyway.

We get all bent out of shape about people being "disenfranchised" through purging. I've worked extensively with voter registration lists. If a registered voter hasn't voted a single time in 4 years, they most certain have moved or are deceased. You know how rare it would be for someone to suddenly vote after missing 6 years of elections, for example? Extremely rare. A four year automatic purge for non-voting would fix many of the problems like the one identified here.