• BertramDitore@lemm.ee
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    20 days ago

    I was actually wondering about this, since a close relative of mine probably won’t make it to election day: if you legally cast your ballot (mail in or absentee), but die before Election Day, does your vote still count?

    • yesman@lemmy.world
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      20 days ago

      Yea. Not only that, when you hear about “dead people voting”, this is often the explanation.

      • snooggums@lemmy.world
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        20 days ago

        Also the thousands of people who die on election day, a non-zero number of which voted earlier that day.

      • neoman4426@fedia.io
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        20 days ago

        The other big chunk is people who have the same or a similar name. Like “It says here David Jones died five years ago, but David Jones voted today. Suspicious?” “Dude, I’m David Jones Jr. The David Jones who died was my dad, David Jones Sr. Dick.” Or whatever.

        • gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          20 days ago

          I am a IIIrd, the third person down my male line with the same first, middle, and last name

          I’m the 5th with our exact initials, too

          One time, while applying for college, I was told I’d already used my GI bill allotment back in '55. Uh… That was grandpa, and he died over 30 years before I was born, how did you mix us up?!?!

          (Also, I was never in the military and this was entirely irrelevant to me they just brought it up as something I couldn’t do)

      • cabbage@piefed.social
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        20 days ago

        I would love to know the winners of past elections counting only the votes of dead people.

        Wouldn’t be surprised if Harris wins in the demography this time around. The greatest generation knows what it means to defeat fascists. But then again there are probably more boomers and anti vaxers dying these days.

    • neoman4426@fedia.io
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      20 days ago

      Depends on the state. Looks like Carter is registered in Georgia. According to an article from 2020 when Republicans were bald face lying that long dead people were voting a lot, someone from the Georgia Secretary of State’s office is quoted as saying secrecy rules don’t allow rejecting a ballot when a voter dies before Election Day.

      “You can’t go back and get that ballot back out. It’s just physically impossible, given the privacy rules in our state,”. May or may not still be accurate, or may have never been accurate, but that’s what the first article I found when searching says.

    • Fump@lemmy.world
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      20 days ago

      Depends on the state. Georgia, where Carter lives, is silent on the issue so it should count. Some state explicitly allow counting them, some states explicitly forbid counting. Some states are silent on the issue.

      • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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        20 days ago

        Once the ballot is cast, there’s no way to pull it out. If you could, that would violate the secrecy of the ballot. They would be able to know who anyone voted for.

        • yamsham@lemm.ee
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          20 days ago

          Ignore me, sounds like he’s probably right

          ~~I really don’t think this is true, ballots get pulled out all the time if they’re found to be invalid. If there’s an issue with how it’s filled out, like bubbling multiple entries or signature issues, stuff like that, if there’s an issue with their registration or the incredibly rare instances of actual voter fraud, all those ballots get pulled out unless they get corrected.

          I guess I can kinda see your point about how if an individual ballot gets challenged and removed, and you see the overall vote count change by one you’d obviously know who that ballot was cast for. But in order for that to happen it would have to be an invalid ballot, so I’m not sure it’s really that important to keep a vote that didn’t count secret. Also in this particular case the person’s dead.

          I’m certainly not advocating a law like this be passed, and maybe there’s some federal policy that would prevent it from being enforced, but logistically speaking I don’t see the problem.~~

          • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
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            20 days ago

            Afaik in most democracies, ballots are verified as from being legit people, then anonimised , then checked for being valid (not spoilt ballots) then processed to see what they voted for.

            During counting you can remove a ballot for being spoilt but not due to its caster being dead.

            • yamsham@lemm.ee
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              20 days ago

              Interesting, that makes sense. I thought I’d heard about individual ballots being challenged in all the 2020 bs, but I just looked it up and it looks like ballots can only be challenged before they’re counted, which matches with what you just said. So probably what I’d heard is either challenges that came in before that point, or it was republican nonsense that was presumably shot down.

              But yeah, verifying -> anonymizing -> counting and they can’t go backwards makes a lot of sense, and that would fundamentally prevent removing dead people. Thanks for explaining

          • ccunning@lemmy.world
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            20 days ago

            Provisional ballots can be held back until a voter’s eligibility is verified but once a ballot is put into the general pool there is no way.

            And that’s separate from not being able to count a ballot that was incorrectly filled. Those ballots are not tied to a specific voter.

    • eldavi@lemmy.ml
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      19 days ago

      in the battleground states: likely not because you need sufficient justification for going absentee/mail; something that isn’t common to the other states.