An Ol' Broad's Ramblings
But There’s No Fraud, Right?
Eyewitness News Uncovers people who were born in the 1800s and still voted in Shelby County.
Eyewitness News Chief Investigator Jeni DiPrizio discovered that there are more than 1,000 dead voters still on the election rolls in Shelby County. And some of them even made it to the polls last August.
Elizabeth Gage died eight years ago and she is buried in north Shelby County. But records show that she somehow was still able to vote in the August Primary Election.
Gage’s family members say that is news to them. “No she didn’t! She died in 2000, January 2000,” said Gage’s niece Bettye Green. She went on to say, “It seems like someone’s not on the ball and really checking out all of these things. I can’t imagine how the voter registration wasn’t destroyed or whatever they do before this time.”
According to Brook Thompson, the Tennessee State Coordinator of Election, the state gave the Shelby County Election Commission the names of about 4,400 residents who passed away. Thompson says the election commission was supposed to remove those names from the voter registration list. As of this month, about 1,800 of those residents were still registered to vote in Shelby County.
Rich Holden is a Shelby County Election Commissioner. Holden says two federal laws aimed at voter rights have made it harder to purge names from voter registration lists than in the past. Holden says “the thought was, better to have someone in there who was deceased than it would to disenfranchise people and take away their right to vote.”
Uh, pardon my stupidity, but if they are DEAD, they aren’t ‘disenfranchised’!
Holden says the election commission can’t just look at the age of voters and then go check to see if the voter is alive. He says that would be considered age discrimination. Commissioners can’t target certain people.
If I’m dead, I shouldn’t be voting, should I? I’m just askin’. And if they showed picture ID, with their voter’s registration card, I don’t think asking someone’s age would be an issue.
When Eyewitness News asked Holden if he had ever just gone and looked at the rolls himself, he replied he did and “had the same questions you did.”
Chairman of the Shelby County Republican Party Bill Giannini said, “We can’t continue to keep people on the rolls if we want it to be accurate.”
The Democratic Chairman Keith Norman says he supports national standards for purging voter lists. Norman says if nationwide standards were in place, all counties would have the same rules to follow for removing voters. But, Norman says he doesn’t want to see certain people target and removed from the list.
Target? Criminy. THEY ARE DEAD!
Holden says he is looking into what happened to Gage and three other voters. Eyewitness News Uncovered that they were still able to vote, despite not being alive. Holden is trying to determine if someone impersonated the voters, or if there was some sort of clerical error.
Giannini says even if this was just a mistake; if dead people were not still on the voter rolls, then the mistake could not be made.
If dead folks voted in the primary, don’t you think someone would notice the smell?
