The Dead Have Risen...

I see dead people... and they're voting...

An untold number of ballots from people who have died since casting them will be counted this year because of the haphazard and cumbersome process of enforcing laws in many states to weed out these votes.

With millions of voters taking advantage of new, in-person early voting in at least 30 states this year, it's even more likely that such "ghost" votes will be counted because, in most cases, those ballots are impossible to retrieve. Besides, it could be days or weeks after the election before local officials get word someone has died.

... The thousands of lawyers from both parties who will be descending on battleground states Tuesday looking for reasons to pick up a few votes could find the phenomenon of dead voters more than just an Election Day curiosity.

In Florida alone, more than 1.8 million people, many of them elderly and sick retirees, have cast absentee ballots or voted early in person in the past two weeks.

How many of those voters won't be alive on Election Day? Considering that an average of 455 voting-age people die in Florida every day, and that the 2000 presidential election was decided by a mere 537 votes, dead votes that slip through the cracks could become a meaningful bloc.

... The problem has arisen as an unintended consequence of laws meant to prevent a repeat of the 2000 presidential election debacle. Unlike traditional mail-in absentee ballots that are stored in labeled envelopes and can be pulled if someone dies, most of the new "in-person" early voting is being done on machines with no paper ballot to tell how those people voted.

So if a person in Florida casts an early ballot, then is run over by a truck right outside the polling place, there's no way to rescind the vote. But the vote of a Florida soldier who mails an absentee ballot from Iraq, then is killed in action, won't — or shouldn't — be counted.

That last line is pretty perverse. But I doubt dead voters will be deciding this election anywhere outside of Philadelphia and Cleveland. Of course, Kerry will win big with this block -- there are plenty of us wondering when his personality died.