Attack of the Zombie Voters

One of the best tools in the Republican arsenal of voter suppression is voter ID laws. These are usually justified by claims of huge numbers of impersonators, illegal immigrants, felons and dead people voting.

The Washington Post looked into one such case: numerous Republican politicians in South Carolina claimed that 900 dead people voted in elections there, and used these "facts" as evidence that voter ID laws were the only solution.

So South Carolina hastily passed a voter ID bill in time for the 2012 election, but the courts delayed its implementation until 2013. Oh, and an investigation was called for. But guess what?

The State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) conducted an extensive probe, which was completed May 11, 2012. But the final report was just made public this month after a 13-month review by Wilson’s office. In fact, the report was only released after Corey Hutchins of the Columbia (S.C.) Free Times submitted an open records request under the Freedom of Information Act. He received the report the day before the 4th of July holiday — perfect timing for news designed to be buried.

It turns out the claims of 953 votes by dead people actually involved not one election but 74 elections over a seven-year period. 

So SLED’s investigation centered on 207 votes that allegedly were made by dead people in the Nov. 2, 2010 election — when a total of 1,365,480 votes were cast — after officials concluded that that batch constituted a “representative sampling” of the alleged voting irregularities. (Note that the number of alleged dead votes was less than 2/10,000th of all of the votes cast in that election.)

The report confirms what the State Election Commission had found after preliminarily examining some of the allegations: The so-called votes by dead people were the result of clerical errors or mistaken identities.

In other words, zombie voters are just as fictional as the flesh-eating ones.

In addition to numerous clerical errors, the false positives included misidentifying living voters with the same name as deceased (sons with the same names as their dead fathers), bad data matching, scanners that incorrectly attributed a vote to a dead person, people who received absentee ballots who died without voting (not criminal in any sense), and one person whose absentee ballot was counted after they died -- which is exactly what South Carolina law calls for.

The episode in South Carolina is typical of Republican scandal-mongering. Phony up some voting data, misrepresent a tragedy in Benghazi, or solicit a bogus report from IRS inspector general. Cause a huge uproar and shout to the high heavens that there's a terrible conspiracy. Demand immediate action and a thorough investigation.

Then bury the results of the investigation when it turns out that there was never any kind of a scandal in the first place.