M. Night Shyamalan come on down, not only does Connecticut have a 30% film tax credit but we have the plot all lined up for your next movie. 243 zombies dead people are still on the Norwalk voter rolls according to a study undertaken by the journalism students at UCONN. And not only are they on the rolls, but they voted! Well 11 of them did. Which is totally amazing, because even though my roots trace back to Chicago, where voting is a contact sport, in this modern computerized day, it seems unfathomable that dead people can vote. From the Courant:

Following up on the matches, UConn students examined the records of nearly 100 of the suspect voters at 10 town and city halls among those with the most cases. Guilford led the state with 39, followed by West Hartford (17), Enfield (15), Stonington (13) and Norwalk (11).

Well, looks like our registrars have some explaining to do. But so do 159 other towns. More from the Courant:

All but nine of Connecticut’s 169 municipalities listed dead people on active voter rolls. At least 100 cases were identified in each of 28 cities and towns. In New Haven alone, 370 dead people were still registered; in Enfield there were 321; in West Haven, 310; in Hartford, 298; and in Bridgeport, 293.

The UConn investigation also found instances of people who were not registered yet were able to vote — under a dead person’s name — along with frequent discrepancies between the state data and paper voting records at local town halls.

The potential for fraud is most serious in municipal elections, when officials are not required to check photo identification at the polls and voters need only sign a statement attesting to their identity.

The UConn findings highlight two nagging problems facing officials trying to keep accurate voting records. First is the informal and antiquated ways many local registrars remove dead people from voter rolls. Second is the potential for clerical errors when registrars transfer information from paper voting lists to the state database, especially in the rush to update by the two-day, post-election deadline.

The really amazing part, one that up until this article I never gave a thought to,  was how registrars are notified of deaths. The short answer, they’re not. They have to read the obituary notices and then see if a death certificate was filed with the town clerk. Not exactly a state of the art way to do it. But here we can point at the vast inefficiencies of 169 towns doing their own thing, when the state should require that any death certificate be filed to a central source. The current process, according to the Courant, is to notify the town clerk in the town where the death occurred, not where the deceased lived. There is a state database, but the article was unclear on how easily accessible it is to municipalities.

And then, there’s the issue of the state database being rife with errors too. Somehow the article doesn’t mention that, while briefly touching on the fines Norwalk’s registrars incurred by not moving to the centralized system. Seems like the state could do a check against vital records and the voter database and then shoot off an email for a municipality to verify that the voter should be purged. That would be the sensible comment on the issue. But back to the movie version–picture 93 East ave as the defacto haunted house, with ghosts of Norwalk’s past hanging out on the porch, filling out absentee ballots. Bruce Willis arrives as the UCONN journalism professor investigating and he sees dead people ….

source: Courant, Dead Voters?Probe Finds Errors In Records,  By MARCEL DUFRESNE, April 20, 2008