Posted November 10, 2006
Paul Edward Parker, The Providence Journal
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The secretary of state's office ordered a copy of a federal list of dead people yesterday, the same day The Providence Journal published a story reporting that the paper had found nearly 5,000 registered voters from Rhode Island on the federal list.
The Journal had found 4,991 matches by comparing names and birthdates on the state's central voter registration list to the Social Security Administration's Death Master File. Since the 1930s, Social Security has kept track of people enrolled in the program who died. Starting in the 1960s, that information has been stored in a computer database. The Journal compared the Rhode Island portion of that database to the database of registered voters in Rhode Island, called the CVRS, for Central Voter Registration System.
"We're going to do the same kind of cross-check against the CVRS," Peter G. Kerwin, a spokesman for Secretary of State Matthew A. Brown, said yesterday. He said the state yesterday requested the Death Master File from the Social Security Administration.
After performing the same type of matching that The Journal has done, elections officials will take steps to confirm deaths and remove the dead from voter registration lists.
Because not all deaths are reported to the Social Security Administration, not all people who die are listed in the master file. The administration also cautions that, because of errors, some of the people listed in the master file may, in fact, still be alive. Also, the matching method used by The Journal would produce false positives if a registered voter had the first name, last name and date of birth, including year, as someone who died and the middle initial was the same or missing. The only reliable way to confirm the newspaper's list would be to examine death certificates, which are not public records in Rhode Island and not available to the newspaper.
Kerwin said that, although the secretary of state's office will coordinate processing of the Social Security list, it is up to local boards of canvassers to remove dead people from the voting list.
State law allows only two methods of removing voters, he said.
Several times a year, the state Health Department sends local canvassers printed lists of people who died in their communities. Those voters can be removed immediately.
Voters can also be declared inactive if a mailing from the secretary of state or other agencies that use the voter list, such as the jury commissioner or local canvassers, is returned as undeliverable. After being declared inactive, voters can be removed if they miss two consecutive federal elections.
Kerwin said yesterday that officials had not determined the process for removing dead voters found by using the Social Security list.
It is too soon to tell whether any of the 4,991 dead people identified by The Journal were recorded as voting in Tuesday's election. That information will be available in several weeks when local boards of canvassers issue a report to the secretary of state about who voted.
The Journal also looked at the situation community-by-community, calculating which communities proportionally had the most or fewest dead people on their voter lists.
The Journal found people on the voting list who died as recently as May and as long ago as 1988.
The party breakdown for dead people registered to vote was: Democrats, 2,394, Republicans, 391, and unaffiliated, 2,206.
The Journal obtained its copy of the Death Master File from the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, which bought a copy from the federal government in July. The entire Death Master File contained 77 million names. The paper got only those records that could be connected to Rhode Island by one or more of four criteria: state in which the Social Security number was issued, state in which the death was reported, state in which the person listed a residence and state to which the lump-sum death benefit was sent. The Rhode Island slice had 467,217 names in it.
The Journal got the central voter registration list from the secretary of state's office on Oct. 16.