I see dead people...voting.

[depakid]

Source: KPOJ News

The Cascade Policy Institute reported last week that state voter rolls include the names of 6,000 dead people.

Secretary of State Bill Bradbury says not to worry, dead people can't sign a ballot and forging a ballot is a Class "C" Felony. Bradbury says election officials investigated the charges and found of the 6,000 names over 4900 were inactive registrants. A voter may be deemed inactive if they have moved and not updated their info or have not voted in 5 years.

Inactive voters do not recieve a ballot by mail. Bradbury says of the remaining 1100 active voters a random sampling revealed about half of those were alive and kicking.


Read more: http://www.620kpoj.com/cc-common/news/sections/newsarticle.html?feed=123543&article=4478987

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Note: The Cascade Policy Institute is a Libertarian/Free Market Fundamentalist outfit.

As far as I'm aware, this is their first foray into Republican vote suppression.

[whistle]

1. Those are the republicans

[skooooo]

2. Better call Ghost Hunters!

:rofl:

[stillcool]

3. I don't recall in previous years..

so many of these charges being made before the election. It's great that the charges are being shot down.

[depakid]

4. Especially not with keystone cops methods like this

This is supposedly a "think tank" - and usually they make some effort to think things through (even while relying on spurious connections and dodgy statistics).

Their arguments here just laughable (though apparently, that hasn't prevented them from getting local play on talk radio, as evidenced by some of the comments on newspaper threads).

[zehnkatzen]

5. I See Stupid Think Tankers

The CPI are indeed a bunch of buffoons. The only thing that's puzzling me is that they haven't got het up about the make-believe republican trope about teh voter fraud sooner, but I'm a big believer in the perversity of the universe. Murphy rules.

Why the CPI are teh_stupid on this is amply demonstrated by an "Editorial Notebook" entry in today's Oregonian in which the CPI's fear receives the proper contempt and is dispatched herewith. An excerpt:

Somehow, a libertarian think tank in Portland thinks this is something to worry about. The Cascade Policy Institute issued a breathless, alarmist charge last week that it had found more than 6,000 dead people on Oregon's voter registration rolls -- people like my dad.

Apparently this naive pseudo-revelation is supposed to render us shocked. Who ever would have imagined that the thousands of registered voters who die every year in Oregon remain on the registration rolls for a while, just exactly like deceased voters in all the other states?

Read the entire thing here.

The CPI's wankery is legend in these parts.

[LiberalFighter]

6. So the Cascade Policy Institute was about 50% wrong on their estimates.

[struggle4progress]

8. More like 90% wrong: they were raising alarms about 6000 names,

but 4900 of those people had dropped down into "inactive" status for not voting, and something like 550 of the remaining 1100 were still alive

So if Cascade wanted to pinpoint any potential voter fraud, they should be looking at the 550 names of people who are dead but have voted recently enough not to fall off the rolls. Simple arithmetic will suggest that about 110 of them were already dead in November 2004 (and probably haven't voted since), while about 440 have died since the last Presidential election

[tclambert]

10. Don't Republicans ever die?

They always act like any registered dead people must be Democrats.

[armed_and_liberal]

7. wow they look like College Republicans!

<>

[DRoseDARs]

9. Well, seeing as dead people can't inform the SoS that they're dead...

...I really don't see them getting off their lazy, rotting asses to cast any ballots. :shrug:

[tanyev]

11. Oh my God! The dead have risen and are voting Republican.

(Bart Simpson)

[davsand]

12. Must be Chicago. n/t

[psomniferum]

13. GOP split

"Note: The Cascade Policy Institute is a Libertarian/Free Market Fundamentalist outfit.

As far as I'm aware, this is their first foray into Republican vote suppression."

I'm thinking the party will basically split into two branches of fundamentalists as a result of this election: economic and religious. It behooves the Libertarians to do this sort of thing.

I heard someone recently claim that one of the chief differences between liberals and conservatives is that liberals, in this case Democrats, are the party of "should be," meaning things should be this way or that. They link this sort of thinking to "hand out" programs. Seems to me that it's liberals who are more realistic, seeking to leverage inherited privilege with the programs that offer a chance for everyone. This opposed to the essentially Utopian idea of a free market, which conveniently overlooks all privilege.

Screw Libertarians and conservatives. They think that the market "should be" able to regulate itself; a stunning gesture of oxymoronic idealism.

[ItNerd4life]

14. Oh please. Dead people vote all the time

especially in Chicago.