Friday, October 10, 2008

Ghostbusting the voter rolls

Former Nashville Channel 2 reporter and Tennessee Center for Policy Research investigator Trent Seibert (along with LeAnn O'Neal and Jennifer Peebles formerly of the Tennessean newspaper) moved on to Texas and hit the ground running by finding dead voters still registered. In this current ACORN climate, Texas is fortunate to have these folks on the job.

[Trent Seibert] heads up the non-partisan news group on the web.Texas Watchdog compared Harris County's voter registration roll with the Social Security death index and found more than 4,000 matches -- registered voters that, it appears, are already dead. KPRC Houston, TX
Here's the Texas Watchdog report.

Is anyone doing this in Tennessee? Do we need any more reasons to require a photo ID for voters?

2 comments:

N.S. Allen said...

Making sure there aren't any errors in voter rolls is always a good thing, though it's worth noting that the Social Security database is hardly a highly accurate way to do that - NC, for instance, is going to stop verifying new voters via SSN after this election, because of the many errors in the database. If the death index is more accurate (which one would hope it is), though, more power to them.

It should also be observed, however, that the ACORN case is hardly as serious a case as the the dead voting would be. It's an issue of voter registration fraud - that is, of submitting information for new "voters" on the rolls who, because they're glaringly fake, can't actually go to the polls.

For a clearer distinction between the two than I can probably make, see here.

(There is, though, the real problem of fake registration forms slowing down the approval of real ones - which, given Obama's superior get-out-the-vote operation, should concern Dems more than Republicans, at least on the partisan side of things.)

Kate said...

I see dead people.