Dead but not forgotten: States grapple with early voters who die before Election Day

More than 60 million voters have cast ballots for the general election this year, and the grim reality is that some of them have died.

Laws in 10 states specifically order their ballots to be counted the same as anyone else’s, and about half the states lack any firm policy, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, an information clearinghouse on state policies.

Three states allow ballots to be challenged on grounds that the voter has since died. Eleven other states, either through law or policy, expressly prohibit dead voters’ ballots from counting.

Good luck finding those ballots.

“I do not know of any states that watch that closely — to actually check the deaths every day as ballots are coming in,” said Cleta Mitchell, an election lawyer and chairman of the conservative-leaning Public Interest Legal Foundation. “So my assumption is that those ballots are still counted regardless of what the state law says.”

Some election officials in states where dead voters’ ballots are not supposed to count told The Washington Times they can try to block the vote, but that requires someone to alert them about the death.

“Any voter who is aware of an individual that has passed away before Election Day after casting their absentee ballot can challenge that ballot,” said Anna Sventek at the secretary of state’s office in New Hampshire.

In Pennsylvania, the state department said it would reject a deceased voter’s mail-in ballot, though the law explicitly states that elections can’t be invalidated if the ballots are counted.

Local officials said spotting the death of an advance voter would be virtually impossible and culling mail-in ballots is tricky.

The National Conference of State Legislatures agrees.

“As a practical matter, it is hard to retrieve ballots from people who have died between casting their votes and Election Day,” the conference says in its memo detailing current practices. “Once the absentee ballot has been verified and removed from the envelope for counting, the ballot cannot be retraced to the voter. Catching a ballot, then, is only possible when it is still in its return envelope and only in cases where election officials have received notice of the death.”

The Washington Times contacted a half-dozen jurisdictions where laws require the rejection of dead voters’ advance ballots. None was able to provide a count for the number of ballots disqualified.

The issue drew attention this year after former President Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 in October, cast an advance ballot in Georgia. The state has no explicit law governing voters who die before Election Day, so the consensus is that it would be counted.

Elections used to be definitive snapshots of how groups of people voted on a specific day. As states expand advance and absentee voting, elections increasingly approximate a much larger group over the six weeks leading up to Election Day.

The move toward mail-in voting creates wrinkles because live ballots are floating around communities.

In Colorado, one of the mail-in voting states, one county reported a dozen stolen ballots. Three of them had already been tallied, and a fourth was about to be counted. The intended voter, who never received the ballot, got an alert that it was being processed and notified officials.

In Vancouver, Washington, a fire engulfed a drop box, ruining about 475 ballots. Local election officials scrambled to resolve the problem.

The county auditor said officials can get information from many of the ballots to notify voters. They also ask people who dropped off a ballot in the 40 hours between the last ballot pickup and the fire to check online whether the county had processed their vote.

The ballot box had a fire suppression system that failed.

Just across the state line in Portland, Oregon, another incendiary device went off inside a ballot box. The suppression system worked, and only a few ballots were scorched.

The numbers are small compared with the 160 million people who voted in the 2020 presidential election.

Officials have no way of knowing how many dead voters’ advance ballots are counted nor how many of those were cast in states where it is illegal.

This would have been unfathomable to George Washington and his fellow founders, who voted in open session and answered out loud when the sheriff called their names.

By the late 1800s, the secret ballot had become standard to protect the privacy of the vote. Election Day was still a singular event.

Fifty years ago, just 2.5% of ballots were cast in advance, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab. In 2000 it was 14%. In 2020, during the acute pandemic public health emergency, it was nearly 70%. In 2022, that slid to 47% — the second highest on record.

Ms. Mitchell said she encouraged people to vote in advance, but in person.

“There are so many problems with the [Postal Service] and mail delivery this year, and I think people are realizing that to secure your vote, you need to vote in person,” she said.