HARTFORD, Connecticut - October 6,
2008 - An in-depth look at voter rolls across the state by a group of
University of Connecticut journalism students earlier this year found that
about 8,500 dead people were registered to vote, and that clerical errors made
it appear that 300 of them actually had voted.
A closer look by state election officials thus far has found no evidence of election fraud, though the review is ongoing. The students' effort focused attention on weaknesses in public record keeping at the local level that allowed thousands of mistakes to go undetected.
After the report appeared in The Hartford Courant in April, Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz started an investigation to determine if local officials were taking all appropriate measures to ensure the accuracy of voter lists.
Six months into the review, and less than a month from a presidential election, Bysiewicz said her office has been - and still is - working with local officials to make sure that the names of the deceased are removed from voter rolls.
The review won't be finished before the Nov. 4 election, she said.
"While we want to remove dead people from the rolls, we don't want to be overzealous and disenfranchise people," Bysiewicz said Friday.
She said that since the UConn group collected the data, 5,300 names have been confirmed deceased and they have been taken off voter lists across the state. Another 1,300 are under review, and the rest have been corrected through the normal course of voter registrations.
The Secretary of State's review found that one of the main reasons the names of the dead can appear on voter lists is the patchwork nature of the current system of death notification used by registrars to keep the lists up to date.