The Dead Man Voting Myth

 I really don't know what I am talking about here, so I am making some broad assumptions that I can't prove.

They are based on some things I know about data bases however.

They are also based on some things I know about voting by mail - I live in Washington; along with Oregon, vote by mail has been our only way to vote for years.

First let's talk data bases.

When I worked for IBM back when computers cost at a minimum hundreds of thousands of dollars each, and printers and stuff like that even upped the price tag, I worked for the part of IBM that was charged with finding new customers.

The cornerstone component of that effort was a data base of business names sorted by SIC code and with various other useful demography.

That data base was always an IBM proprietary thing, but it was based on data that could be bought and re-bought over time from organizations like D&B.

We took what we got from one and smashed it together with what we bought from another.

Once smashed together we had something that began to be IBM only.

It was only as accurate as the accuracy of the last update from the providing organizations.

To assure currency we always bought their periodic updates.

There were a lot of new IBMers in those days - trainees - and one of their early assignments was always to wrestle with the accuracy and currency of  that vital IBM new business tool.

We used that data base for a lot of things; every territory manager had his or her version; when we had Branch Office wide prospecting days we always used that tool for making all the phone calls involved in prospecting days.

There were always a lot of dead people in those lists; business owners had a nasty habit of not being immortal, and no matter how hard D&B and the rest - and our trainees - tried to keep the list accurately current, people who were in the data base died.

I think it likely that County Government's Voters Files are equally subject to voters dying.

Given the truth of that it is hard to deny the shrill shrieks of donnie and his morons that there are dead people on the voter lists; the problem is that they add a bogus "therefore", that being that the dead people on those lists are voting.

There seems to be no proof of that history to date, but lack of facts is just grist for donnie's mill of lies.

So my first assumption is that donnie and the morons take an unavoidable fact and turn it into a totally fictitious trumpian alternate fact.

My second assumption is that if a dead person votes, he or she probably isn't dead, and that such a vote is therefore valid.

I base that assumption on my experience with Washington's voting system.

Ballots are only sent to validly registered voters.

I am a validly registered voter.

If I were dead and if the normal flow of that information had not been reflected in the county's voter list I guess it is possible that a ballot might be mailed to my address; that is analogous to IBM calling dead people on prospecting day; its just hard keeping up with real time currency the flow of dead people entering any list.

But there is a reason that voters sign ballots in Washington State.

I guess that reason is that signature is still unique and its exact duplicate dies with the person who has used it through life.

It's even used on checks.

I am not aware of an epidemic of check forgery being rampant in the land.

There probably is a reason for that; but that is an assumption.