A CBS2 investigation in Chicago has shown that some dead citizens have had votes cast in their name after the date they died. In some cases, dead citizens have been on record as voting for decades.
One man, Floyd Stevens, died in 1993. However, records show he has been voting beyond the grave and has cast a ballot 11 times since his death.
Stevens’ daughter, Sharon Stevens Anderson, told CBS2: “It’s crazy. I don’t see how people can be able to do something like that and get away with it.”
Susan Sallee, dead since 1998, is shown to have cast a vote 12 years later in Chicago. Another citizen, Victor Crosswell, died in 1994 but has since voted six times.
CBS2 investigators found these cases after comparing the Social Security Administration’s master death file with that of the Chicago Board of Election voter history records. The investigation showed that 119 dead people had cast 229 votes for the past decade in Chicago alone.
While some instances are due to relatives of the same name as their dead family members accidentally casting votes under the wrong registration, many are through to be straight forward fraud.
A city board election spokesman, Jim Allen, said that this is “not the bad old days. There are just a few instances here where a father came in for a son, or a neighbor was given the wrong ballot application and signed it.”
Don Rose, a political consultant, told CBS2: “Some of these could be accidental or just some individual who says, ‘I really like such and such a candidate so I’m going to take advantage of this — vote until they stop me.’”
Investigators found multiple examples where the dead were not eliminated from the voter rolls after they died, despite Jim Allen saying about 60,000 had been removed in the past decade.
“Any time you can clean up the rolls it helps reduce and eliminate the prospect of any kind of mistake or fraud,” Allen says.
Robert Sallee, Susan Sallee’s son, claims he has repeatedly tried to report his mother’s death the election officials but “they’re just not taking her off the rolls.”
[revad2]
