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Grave Matter: Detroit Paper Says Dead People Voted in Election
Published: February 26, 2006 3:15 PM ET
DETROIT A newspaper's review of ballots cast in the November election shows many were cast under the names of people who have died, were serving time in prison or did not live in the city.
Detroit election records say Fred Douglas Henley voted at a polling precinct Nov. 8. Henley, however, died the day before the election, and his voting address long has been vacant and boarded up, The Detroit News reported Sunday.
Blanche Credit died in 2003. But she's recorded as voting in November, too.
It is unknown whether Henley and Credit were names someone used to cast fraudulent votes or whether they simply represent clerical errors. Mistakes commonly occur when election workers record a vote under a similar name or confuse voters with their relatives. But the problems have prompted Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land to call for faulty voter rolls to be purged in virtually every jurisdiction.
Detroit's newly elected clerk, Janice Winfrey, said she has ordered her staff to purge at least 50,000 names from the voter rolls by March.
"We've got a lot of cleaning up to do," Winfrey said.
Detroit's voter rolls include as many as 20,000 dead people and roughly 100,000 wrong addresses, The newspaper said. Wrong birthdates and garbled spellings on the city's active voter list make it difficult to determine in many instances who actually voted, and thousands of properties that are abandoned or vacant have remained on the voter rolls.
Across Michigan, 132 people were listed as having voted in November's local elections although they had recently died, said Mark Grebner, whose company, Practical Political Consulting in East Lansing, analyzes voter rolls. About 26 of those were in Detroit, Grebner said.
The News' review of ballots in Detroit's Nov. 8 election found a ballot recorded as being cast by a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder. Felons can vote in Michigan, but not while serving a sentence. In another case, city records indicate a ballot was cast by someone at least 146 years old.
Keeping names of the deceased and nonresidents on the rolls allows votes to accidentally be marked in those names, Grebner said.
"It allows for mismanaged elections and for the possibility of vote fraud because the records cannot be depended on," he said.
But Land's spokeswoman, Kelly Chesney, said purging voter rolls is complicated by restrictive federal rules designed to protect voters from disenfranchisement.
Winfrey's new director of elections, Daniel Baxter, says cleaning the voter rolls is his first priority.
"We think if we can resolve the low-hanging-fruit issues, then one step at a time we can bring back the integrity of the process," Baxter said.
Although there has been no proof of fraud, Detroit's election was surrounded by suspicions, particularly regarding absentee ballots.
A Wayne County judge ordered absentee ballots to be preserved, along with records of former City Clerk Jackie Currie's "ambassador" program, in which workers were sent to help elderly people vote. And a federal investigation is under way into allegations that some votes were cast in the names of dead people.
But Detroit isn't the only city with problems. Holland, population 30,000, recorded 11 votes cast in the names of deceased people in November's local election, Grebner said.
Holland City Clerk Jennifer French said she had no idea there was such a problem.
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