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As President Donald Trump continued to claim without evidence Tuesday that the presidential election was undermined by voter fraud, social media users falsely claimed that people had cast additional votes using the identities of those killed in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
There is no evidence that this happened.
The false claim that deceased voters cast their votes “comes up in every election,” said Jason Roberts, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Experts told The Associated Press that it is common for state voter rolls to include voters with birth dates that make them look incredibly old, but this is usually explained by human error, software quirks, or voter confidentiality issues.
READ MORE:
* US Elections: The Attorney General tells the Justice Department to investigate allegations of voter fraud if they exist
* US Elections: Fox News Withdraws From Trump Team Press Conference After Alleged Voter Fraud Without Evidence
* US elections: Donald Trump tweets a series of unsubstantiated claims about four states where he is behind US President-elect Joe Biden
* Allegations of electoral irregularities by the Republican Party and the Trump campaign. So far, none have been tested.
Here’s a closer look at this dubious claim:
CLAIM: Dead people in Pennsylvania and Michigan voted in the 2020 presidential election.
THE FACTS: There is no evidence of foul play involving deceased voters in the elections, according to officials in both states.
A tweet repeating the false claim read: “These are some of the people who voted in #PA … 840 were 101 or older, 39 lived through the Civil War, 45 were born in the 19th century.”
The tweet had more than 18,000 retweets.
“A similar complaint was filed with a Palestinian Authority court and flatly rejected,” the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office said in a statement.
“The court did not find any deficiencies in the way that PA maintains its voter lists, and there is currently no evidence that any deceased person voted in the 2020 election.”
There was an incident in Luzerne County in which a registered Republican allegedly attempted to apply for an absentee ballot on behalf of his deceased mother, but did not make it past the application phase.
“This case is further proof that our election will be protected by state and local officials alike,” tweeted Attorney General Josh Shapiro in October.
After social media users distributed videos allegedly showing the names of voters killed in Michigan, the AP contacted one of the named individuals. She was very much alive and had just hit her husband in the cribbage.
According to experts, seeing strange dates of birth on voter lists that appear to belong to deceased registrants is not evidence of voter fraud, and there are multiple reasons why it can occur.
Tracy Wimmer, a spokeswoman for the Michigan secretary of state’s office, told the AP that on rare occasions a ballot received from a voter may be recorded as if that person were too old to be alive. This can occur when an incorrect year of birth is entered on the voter rolls.
When the date of birth is entered, the numbers can be accidentally changed or simply misspelled, according to Tammy Patrick, a former Arizona elections official who now works for the Democracy Fund, a foundation that works on voting issues.
“Some states have a default ‘year of birth’ that they entered for the records that did not have a year of birth on the old paper forms when the voter registration was moved from paper to computer,” explained Roberts, the science professor. policies, in an email.
“Those are never updated, and as time goes on, the voters with this issue seem ‘older’ whether they are or not.”
David Goldman / AP
Trump supporters protest the results of the presidential election on the steps of the state Capitol in Lansing, Michigan.
In Pennsylvania, some active voters are listed with the date of birth “01/01/1800”. That date is used for “confidentiality reasons for registered voters,” such as if they are victims of domestic violence, according to a state website.
And sometimes, people who appear to be voting while dead simply share the name and birthday of the deceased, Roberts said.
Absentee ballots cast by Michigan and Pennsylvania residents who die before Election Day are not counted, but voter rolls can sometimes be left behind.
Claims that hundreds of people over 100 voted in Pennsylvania suggest something dire, but Matthew Weill, director of the Election Project at the Center for Bipartisan Politics, said it’s “not that crazy” in 2020.
“There are tens of thousands of centenarians in the United States,” he said.
Throughout the pandemic, social media posts showed seniors casting votes via mail-in ballots for the 2020 election. A 102-year-old Illinois woman, Beatrice Lumpkin, was photographed casting a mail-in ballot while wearing a hazmat suit.
Some of the claims about dead voters appear to stem from an active federal lawsuit alleging that Pennsylvania did not “maintain accurate and up-to-date voter lists” that include 21,000 apparently deceased registrants.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative group based in Indiana, amended the lawsuit on November 5 against Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar.
The group has taken legal action in a handful of places to try to force the pruning of voters. In December 2019, the group filed a lawsuit against Detroit election officials alleging that the city had more than 2,500 deaths on voter rolls, including one born in 1823. The lawsuit was dropped in June 2020 after officials Electoral elections updated voter lists.
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