Posted on 10/18/2008 8:47:52 AM PDT by april15Bendovr
Local 2 investigates dead voters.
The push to register voters for this year's presidential election is breaking records.
More than 1.9 million people are registered to vote in Harris County alone.
But how many of the people listed on the voter roll are actually eligible to cast a ballot?
Investigative reporter Amy Davis shows you how hundreds of voters could sway this year's election -- voters who are not even alive.
"All-in-all, a great person, a great woman, just a wonderful person" is how Alexis Guidry described her mother to Local 2 Investigates.
"As far back as I can remember, they've always voted in the election," Guidry said of her parents.
The March 2008 Primary was no exception. Voting records show Alexis' mom, Gloria Guidry, cast her ballot in person near her South Houston home.
"It was just very shocking, a little unsettling," said Alexis Guidry.
It's unsettling because Gloria Guidry died of cancer 10 months before the March Primary.
"She'd be very upset," Guidry said when asked what her mom would think.
Trent Seibert, of Texas Watchdog, says you should be too.
"This is really disquieting. It's concerning. It's worrisome," said Seibert.
He heads up the non-partisan news group on the web.
Texas Watchdog compared Harris County's voter registration roll with the Social Security death index and found more than 4,000 matches -- registered voters that, it appears, are already dead.
Some of them, like Henderson Hill's late wife Linda, voted postmortem.
"I would like to know who did it, myself," Hill told Davis.
We don't know who used Linda Hill's or Gloria Guidry's IDs to vote, but we do know if their names had been purged from voter rolls after they died, using their IDs wouldn't have worked.
"This is a red flag. No matter where you are, this should set off alarm bells," Seibert said. "Someone needs to take a look at this."
Local 2 Investigates took the information to the Harris County Voter Registrar.
"We just kind of work with the systems that we're allowed to," explained George Hammerlein, the director of Harris County Voter Registration.
The county's system for culling deceased voters from the roll seems painfully primitive.
We watched employees clip obituaries from the newspaper and sort through probate records for names matching those on the roll. But, Hammerlein says while fraud is a concern, for his office, disenfranchising voters is a bigger one.
"We do all we can, but you know we'd rather err on the side of leaving people on the roll instead of taking them off inadvertently," he said.
But could that cautious "better safe than sorry" standard sway an election some say will be a close one?
Texas Watchdog found 4,462 registered voters who appear to be deceased.
In 2000, George Bush won the presidential election by a mere 537 votes in Florida.
"We've never had any evidence there's a concerted attempt at fraud," Hammerlein told Local 2.
But there is evidence the state agency in charge of ensuring only eligible voters can vote is not.
The State Auditor's Office conducted an audit of the voter registration system at the Secretary of State's Office last November.
Auditors identified 49,049 registered voters state-wide who may have been ineligible to vote. Approximately 23,576 may have been deceased and another 23,114 were possible felons. And they found more than 2,359 duplicate records.
The auditor did not find any instances in which potentially ineligible voters actually voted, but they wrote, "Although the Secretary of State's office has processes to identify many ineligible voters and remove them from the State's voter registration list, improvements can be made."
Almost a year after this audit, we wanted to know if the Secretary of State has made any improvements. Have they added any safeguards to the process?
No one from that office would talk to us on camera, but the Director of Elections told us, "We'd rather err in leaving someone on the roll than taking someone off."
"If there's something wrong here, if there's something amiss, this is the worst election to have that happen, "Seibert warned.
And Guidry agrees.
"I don't think it's a matter that she would take lightly," she said of her mom.
In what she calls an historic election, Guidry says her mother wouldn't want anyone speaking for her.
"I think she would definitely do all that she could just to make sure things were on the up and up."
We sent the information we showed you to the Director of Elections in Austin. She said her office refers any credible allegation of election fraud to the Attorney General for investigation.
She said the cases we presented would be felony violations.
Visit www.texaswatchdog.org for more information about how Texas Watchdog found dead voters on the rolls.
This is a legal crime, but it’s a moral crime too.
MISTAKE - Change title to “.....Investigates Dead DEMOCRAT Voters”.
Once you destroy the faith in the integrity of the political system, the rest of polity comes tumbling down. We become no better than a banana republic with rigged elections and a political elite. The political fabric of the country is torn apart.
I’m shocked that such a thing would happen in Houston.
They should also investigate the dead people that are still collecting their Social Security checks every month.
The two party system:
Party 1) Endorses moral concepts
Party 2) Claims there is no right or wrong
How can election officials, who in many cases belong to one side or the other, be equally as competent? One party strives for fairness and the other doesn’t believe in right or wrong. Public Accountability is the only only answer. Everything must be in plain sight.
They never did mention a political PARTY that these known dead folks had their votes cast for.
To me, that says DEMOCRAT. Surely, if these corpses votes had gone Republican, it would be the FIRST thing out of the reporters’ mouths.
IF they even checked, (and that's a big if) I call BS on this. Prove it! Let an independent, non-governmental firm do the audit!
The fact is that neither the D's nor the R's have any interest in truly honest elections. They are called POLITICIANS for a reason!
Let’s see, thousands of Katrina “victims” moved from N.O. to Houston. A connection? Nah!
Channel 2 in Houston is KPRC, not WPRC.
It would be interesting to see what region has the highest percentage of registered dead voters (I’d bet on New Orleans myself).
This brings up another question...can dead folks count on the census just as well? We are already counting non-citizens...so I don’t see why we couldn’t count dead voters just as well.
Another article on vote fraud under George Hammerlein:
http://www.texaswatchdog.org/2008/10/dead-voters-still-registered-in-harris-county/
Does anyone know his party affiliation? I can’t seem to find it with google. I presume he’s a Democrat.
Who ever voted deliberately tried to steal the election, not just a dead persons’ vote.
How to stop this? Maybe ask LBJ?
Thanks for the correction
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