Ohio purging dead people from voter rolls - 13abc.com Toledo (OH) News, Weather and Sports

Ohio is a battleground state in the presidential election, this year.  But a lot of dead people are still listed on voter rolls.  Ohio is trying to purge it's voter rolls of dead people and that could mean thousands of names are taken off the list.

It sounds incredible, but thousands of people who died are still eligible to vote because they are listed on county voting rolls across Ohio. 

There's nothing wrong with eligible voters casting ballots.   But there are problems with someone fraudulently casting a ballot in the name of a dead person who's still listed as an eligible voter.

This happens because Ohio can only monitor registered voters who die in Ohio.  In Lucas County, dozens of dead people are taken off the voting rolls, each month, because Ohio provides counties with a list of residents who have died in state.   Meghan Gallagher, the Director of the Lucas County Board of Elections says, "I believe, last week, we had 89 deceased voters who had been removed from the rolls."

But in Ohio, more than 18,000 dead people were still registered to vote, as of April.  Wood County had more than 56-hundred dead people on its rolls.  Williams and Ottawa counties had 30 and 2 dead people enrolled, respectively.@

The problem is, sometimes Ohio voters die in other states, but without a system of sharing that information, dead people remain on voter rolls.  Jon Stainbrook, Chairman of the Lucas County Republican party says, "In Ohio, if a person is deceased and they're not removed from the voter rolls, they're still registered to vote."

That could inspire some fraudulent person to assume the dead person's identity and vote and they may never be caught.

In general, Ohio, and Lucas County in particular, don't really have a problem with dead people voting on election day.  But with dead people on the voter rolls, it does cost you money.

The Board of Elections sends out mailers, at taxpayer expense and has to use extra voting machines and even reconfigure precincts based on what could be inaccurate voting rolls that are bloated by dead people.

But last week, Ohio and 24 other states agreed to share death certifications to help each other purge their rolls of dead people.

Stainbrook says, "That's one way that we have to be able to cross-reference databases and we also need to be able to remove people that have been deceased from the voting rolls."

Lucas County Democratic party chairman, Ron Rothenbuhler also believes dead people should be taken off the rolls, telling 13 ABC, "If you're dead, you're not eligible to vote."

Florida, another battleground state, found 53-thousand dead people on it's voter rolls.

In a close presidential election year, every vote should count, but only those that are cast by real live voters.