Are dead people voting in South Carolina? That’s what their DMV director claimed in a sensational hearing a couple of weeks ago. To stop this, South Carolina desperately needs its photo ID law — currently on hold thanks to the Chicago thugs in the Obama Justice Department — to go into 
effect. “We must have certainty in South Carolina that zombies aren’t voting,” said state Rep. Alan Clemmons.
Except, um, maybe not. The South Carolina attorney general’s office gave the State Election Commission six names off the list of 950 allegedly dead voters, and guess what they found?
In a news release that election agency spokesman Chris Whitmire handed out prior to the hearing, the agency disputed the claim that dead people had voted. One allegedly dead voter on the DMV’s list cast an absentee ballot before dying; another was the result of a poll worker mistakenly marking the voter as his deceased father; two were clerical errors resulting from stray marks on voter registration lists detected by a scanner; two others resulted from poll managers incorrectly marking the name of the voter in question instead of the voter above or below on the list.
So that’s oh-for-six. Five of the six were actually alive and the sixth had voted absentee before dying. There’s no evidence of any fraud at all, just the usual bunch of administrative slip-ups.
This is the story of voter fraud in a microcosm. Claims of fraudulent voting become urban legends practically before the first YouTube video goes up on someone’s website, but upon investigation the actual incidence of voter fraud turns out to be virtually nonexistent. Despite Newt Gingrich’s infatuation with having MasterCard run our country’s immigration program, anyone who’s ever worked in the private sector knows that keeping customer and prospect mailing lists clean is a huge pain in the ass. If you manage to stay even 95% accurate, you’re a genius. That’s doubly true for voter registration rolls, which are a nightmare of people moving, dying, getting married, registering twice by mistake, providing incorrect addresses, and so forth. After any election, you can always find thousands of discrepancies if you look hard enough.
But almost none of them ever turn out to be actual voter fraud. The registration rolls might be sloppy, and poll workers might make mistakes, but practically no one who’s ineligible to vote ever shows up at the polls and tries to vote. Study after study after study has made this crystal clear.
But it doesn’t matter. The 950 graveyard voters in South Carolina have now entered the pantheon of voter fraud paranoia. That’ll be good for passing photo ID laws, which tend to suppress the turnout of Democratic-leaning voting groups, and it’ll be good for Republican Party fundraising, but not for much of anything else.
