A new independent, nationwide analysis of voter rolls in 42 states shows that more than 349,000 dead people still are on those rolls, and tens of thousands more voters have duplicate registrations.
The results come from the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which has launched the "Safeguarding America's Votes and Elections" database as a tool to track voter roll problems.
The findings from its initial review of the integrity of states' voter files come just as states are moving toward mail-in voting this fall.
"The detailed information and analysis presented in this report makes it abundantly clear that states across America, including many that will determine control of the White House and Congress, are unprepared to accommodate a surge in mail-in voting this fall," PILF President J. Christian Adams said. "After standardizing registration lists in 42 states, Public Interest Legal Foundation's SAVE database uncovered voter rolls saturated with alarming errors. Prior to publishing this report, PILF shared some findings with state election officials in hopes they would validate and act on helpful information. With only weeks to go before the start of early voting, we’re hopeful this report will help spur broader public understanding about apparent problems which call into question the integrity of our election process."
For example, found were 349,773 "apparently deceased registrants" in 41 states' voter rolls. New York, Texas, Michigan, Florida and California accounted for more than half of that total.
"During the 2018 general election, 37,889 likely duplicate registrants are apparently credited for casting two votes from the same address, and 34,000 registrants appear to have voted from non-residential addresses. Additionally, 6,718 registrants were apparently credited for voting after death. During the 2016 general election, SAVE revealed that number was higher, with a total of 7,890 registrants apparently being credited for voting after death," the organization reported.
PILF said it collected information from 42 states and created a format where it could be studied. Then the information was compared to commercial and governmental databases.
"Also included with the data were voter history fields, namely, data about when each registrant voted. The combination of state election data, commercial data, and federal sources such as the Social Security Death Index, provides researchers with perhaps the best platform ever constructed to analyze the health of the voter rolls and catalogue potential vulnerabilities," PILF reported.
Also revealed in the report, called "Critical Condition: American voter rolls filled with errors, dead voters, and duplicate registrations," was that there were 43,760 likely duplicate registrants in 2016 and 5,500 registrants who were credited for voting twice in the same state from two different addresses in 2018.
Adams wrote in the report that he worked with the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in 2018, and the result was "dozens of lawsuits, stonewalling and refusal by many state officials to provide the data, name-calling, and even some old-fashioned political grandstanding."
He said the "reactionary" response was misguided since election integrity campaigns are "intended to protect the most precious right that voters have: the value of their ballot."
The foundation also has several litigation efforts going, including one in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, which in recent years "has received national attention for admitting to registration glitches over decades that resulted in thousands of foreign nationals being registered to vote."
There, another problem appeared when records showed 1,500 voters were born in the 1800s.
Thousands of duplicate and even triplicate registrations also triggered a legal fight in Detroit, but it was dismissed when "local officials had started hunting for death records across the state" and had cleaned up "nearly every one of the thousands of duplicates."
"You cannot hope to improve the contents of American voter registration systems unless you are first willing to digest them in their entirety," the study explains.
And it warned against those mail-in ballot plans.
"In an all-mail voting scenario, hundreds of thousands of dead registrants would get ballots; many thousands more would again have opportunities to vote twice; and many thousands more would have chances to claim mailbox rental stores, warehouses, or gas" stations as residences.
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