Carolyn Perry remembers voting in her first election. It was 1967 in Ohio, a municipal election, and she was 21 years old. “The people at the polls introduced me and said, ‘This is Carolyn and this is her first time to vote,'” recalled the retired special education teacher. Perry, who has been registered to vote in North Carolina since at least 1975, according to election records, was dismayed to receive a letter this month from the Wake County Board of Elections suggesting she may no longer be qualified to vote because she might be dead. “My initial reaction? I was mad as hell,” Perry said Monday morning. Her name was one of nearly 30,000 across the state that volunteers with the Voter Integrity Project identified two weeks ago as potentially being dead but still registered to vote. The Voter Integrity Project is a North Carolina offshoot of True the Vote, a national movement that purports to combat election fraud by challenging the voter registration of those they believe should not be on voter lists. “We’re not really interested in partisan politics,” said Jay DeLancy, a retired Air Force officer and director of Voter Integrity Project. “As an organization, we try to eliminate those kinds of biases in our research.”
However, the subject of voter fraud is inextricably linked to the current political conversation. Republicans in many states, including North Carolina, have led efforts to pass laws that would require people to present picture identification when they go to the polls. That effort failed in North Carolina, but DeLancy recently appeared on a Fox News Channel show calling such laws “common sense”. Democrats have generally pushed back against such laws, saying they would disproportionately affect elderly and minority voters.
Since DeLancy’s group gave those names of potentially dead voters to the State Board of Elections, state and county elections officials have been investigating the list. Some names were already removed through regular list maintenance procedures, officials say. Others required further investigation. In Wake County, letters went to the families of 148 possibly deceased voters.
So far, 42 have sounded off that they’re still among the living.
Full Article: Not dead, but still voting :: WRAL.com.