The Independent View: NY Dead Residents Are Still Voting in Nassau County

Newsday has found more than 6,000 dead people are registered to vote in Nassau County and records show about 270 of them actually voted after their deaths The paper using voter registration and federal death records. Dead registered voters in Nassau County account for nearly 25 percent of the 26,500 dead people registered to vote statewide.

John Ryan, counsel to Nassau County Republican Elections Commissioner Louis Savinetti, couldn't explain why so many dead people were on active voting lists.

As a matter of course, State Board of Elections officials send Nassau and other counties lists of names of people who may no longer be eligible to vote, and those names are supposed to be checked out and then deleted from the database if determined invalid. Counties also send mail each year to all registered voters and, if the mail is returned unopened, those voters are removed from the active registry. They stay on an inactive list for two years before their registration is revoked reports.

A State Board of Elections spokesman told Newsday he didn't know if New York planned to enroll in some of the programs other states have found worthwhile.

In an effort to control voter registration and the ability to double vote, two organizations have created different interstate voter registration systems.

Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC)

The Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) is a non-profit organization with the sole mission of assisting states to improve the accuracy of America’s voter rolls and increase access to voter registration for all eligible citizens. ERIC is governed and managed by states who choose to join, and was formed in 2012 with assistance from The Pew Charitable Trusts. The seven states that pioneered the formation of ERIC in 2012 are: Colorado, Delaware, Maryland, Nevada, Utah, Virginia, and Washington.

They uses multiple data points, including car registration, Social Security lists and change-of-address information to highlight names that should not be on active voting lists in a given district.

The Electronic Registration Information Center Crosscheck Program

The program compares voter registration records annually among the participating states to identify duplicate registrations and double votes. It is a tool states can use to maintain clean, current and accurate voter lists and to fight voter fraud.

The program began in 2005 as an agreement between four Midwestern states – Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska. The four original states comprised approximately 9 million registration records. Today, the states in the program are: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Virginia and will contain more than 90 million voter registration records in the database to compare in 2014.