Thousands of Dead Voters Purged from Washington Voter Rolls

Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire is reporting today that the state of Washington checked their voter rolls with a new statewide database allowing them to find duplicate voter registrations and dead voters. The Seattle Times said:

The database, put in place earlier this year, allowed the state to find 19,579 dead people still on the rolls and 35,445 duplicate voter records.

“It’s a critical piece to help regain the trust and confidence of the voters of the state of Washington,” Secretary of State Sam Reed said Friday. “I think we are slowly but surely rebuilding trust in the system.”

You would think the fact that over 50,000 voters were illegitimately listed on the voter rolls would not rebuild trust in the system! The voter registration examination was necessitated by charges of voter fraud in the state’s 2004 Gubernatorial race. The Democratic candidate won that race by a very narrow margin.

Based on experience canvassing, I would estimate that somewhere between 10% and 20% of voters listed on Ohio voter rolls either (a) are dead or (b) no longer live at the address listed on the Ohio database. Will it take well-substantiated charges of voter fraud in an extremely close statewide race–say, the 2008 Presidential election–to prompt a cleanup of Ohio’s voter registry?

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