I voted in the 2021 election for the current German government. Later, I moved to Berlin, where they had to repeat the election this spring due to some screw-ups back then (turns out running a marathon on election day is not a good idea). So I was asked to vote again and I did. I checked with the authorities and everything is fine.
I suppose there's some noise in any voting system, and it's fine if the magnitude is small and its distribution random. Looking at the US, I'd be more worried about gerrymandering than a few votes from the dead.
alphazard 8 days ago [-]
> I suppose there's some noise in any voting system, and it's fine if the magnitude is small and its distribution random.
This is the right answer. It's amazing how many people insist that elections have absolutely no fraud or other sources of error. In most elections throughout the world, it's apes counting paper with their squishy hands and blurry eyeballs. It's remarkable that we even get 3 significant figures reliably.
cozzyd 8 days ago [-]
It's not unbiased noise though. People with the highest likelihood to die soon (elderly men) have different voting preferences than the general public.
red369 8 days ago [-]
I'm not sure I'm thinking about this correctly, but I'm not sure that it's relevant that elderly men die younger than elderly women. I think it would only be a bias is they were dying at a faster rate, relative to their population size, than other groups. That is, the size of the elderly male population was shrinking compared with the elderly female population.
luoc 8 days ago [-]
Mhm, I noticed the issue is not 100% clear from my description: I eventually got two votes in the same election
lifeisstillgood 8 days ago [-]
Many years ago we ran an event at a hotel for few hundred delegates. One guys booking for shitpiled and he was complaining. My boss tried to explain that 99.9% of the delegates got everything they needed - he came back with “yeah but for me it was 100% wrong”
Voting matters. Individuals matter.
We should aim for no one being 100% wrong
Then again, I disagree with him. It’s just he was a customer.
gerdesj 8 days ago [-]
"One guys booking for shitpiled and he was complaining."
Please correct this sentence.
QuercusMax 8 days ago [-]
I assume "for" should have been "got"
appendix-rock 8 days ago [-]
Yup. Precisely. A lot of election ‘security’ relies on this premise.
loeg 8 days ago [-]
What happens if someone votes in person and dies before polls close later that day? The number of people this is relevant to as a percentage of votes is miniscule.
AStonesThrow 8 days ago [-]
Look, it's a jurisdiction's problem that begins when they decide to open the voting window to weeks rather than a single day.
If someplace permits early voting, then I don't see a moral or ethical justification for nullifying a vote cast by someone who's already legally cast those votes and submitted that ballot, which is now out of their hands and in custody of the State.
If they want to disenfranchise dead people, then discontinue mail-ins and early voting, and compel everyone to show up in person again.
(I detested in-person election days, because I do all my research ahead of time with actual ballot in hand, and I'd never make good decisions in a claustrophobic little box, standing up, with dozens in line waiting for me.)
posnet 8 days ago [-]
What if someone votes, but the caesium atom decays and triggers the poison vial to crack and fill the voting booth?
schmidtleonard 8 days ago [-]
Then it's either completely rigged or perfectly fair, depending on whether Trump lost or won (respectively).
jetrink 8 days ago [-]
I think Missouri's policy is the most correct.
> Missouri prohibits such ballots from being counted if it is proven that the voter died before polls opened and the ballot envelope has not yet been opened.
It seems reasonable to me that to be an eligible voter in an election, you must be alive. A ballot filled out in advance is merely a piece of paper until it is officially cast by an eligible voter on election day. If a voter dies before the polls open and there is a system in place to detect this, their vote should not be counted because they are no longer eligible. Conversely, if the voter is alive even one second after the polls open, their vote should be counted.
BobAliceInATree 8 days ago [-]
We don't have to think of elections as being just a single 'day', and then just guide our laws around that. For example, India's elections took place over 44 days this year.
If we consider voting to be a period of weeks rather than a day (absentee, early voting & election day), then any vote cast legally during that time is valid, and we don't have to have edge cases where a vote was initially valid, but then invalid, but yet have no way to actually remove them.
Sohcahtoa82 8 days ago [-]
I've always considered it ridiculous that so many states only allow voting on a single day.
What's worse is then people argue that we should make Election Day a national holiday, as if that would actually improve turnout (HINT: Ask your local retail, food, or other service worker how easy it is for them to get other holidays like Labor Day or Memorial Day off)
Mail-in voting is great, but I acknowledge that a lot of people don't trust it.
So why don't we do the actual best thing? Make voting open for multiple days. If you need to vote in person, then it only makes sense to keep polls open long enough so that no matter what job you do, no matter what shift you work, you should be able to find the time to vote.
IMO, making the polls open 24 hours for 3 days, or maybe 9 AM to 9 PM for a week, should cover basically everyone except those that travel a lot for their jobs (ie, long haul truckers), but they'd be voting absentee anyways.
shadowgovt 7 days ago [-]
We haven't done it in the US, but technically there isn't much stopping Congress (especially after the New Deal) from passing a law banning various forms of commerce on election day.
We even have a category for it now: essential workers would be the only ones who aren't banned.
soco 7 days ago [-]
Switzerland has mail-in voting since forever and it's trusted. Was the mail-in voting an issue in the US before Trump?
shadowgovt 7 days ago [-]
Mail-in voting is not uniformly allowed in all states in the US, because US elections are a primarily state responsibility (with oversight and constraint placed by the federal government).
So the short answer is "yes; states disagreed on whether it was secure." The longer answer is that states that were doing it didn't have any mathematically-detectable fraud patterns distinguishing them from states that didn't, and states that just started in 2016 didn't seem to have any major systemic execution issues that would suggest fraud occurred.
shadowgovt 8 days ago [-]
There's also an eventual-consistency effect at play.
If the County Elections Office doesn't learn someone died before their ballot is decanted into the general collection for counting, that's it. No way at that point to pull the ballot back out because the source of the vote is anonymous.
bhaney 8 days ago [-]
If a runaway trolley is on course to hit five mail-in voters before election day, and you have the opportunity to pull a lever and divert the trolley to a track with one registered voter who will later be voting at the polls...
xyst 8 days ago [-]
What if you cast an early vote, but declared dead on Election Day after life saving measure fail (23:55 local time). However suddenly wake up the following day (Lazarus Syndrome) at 06:00 local time?
DonHopkins 8 days ago [-]
Or if you're just spending the year dead for tax purposes.
ahazred8ta 8 days ago [-]
"Mr. DonHopkins speaks to no-one."
philip1209 8 days ago [-]
That's interesting - to me, it seems to work like cash basis vs accrual basis accounting depending on the state.
shermantanktop 8 days ago [-]
Nice try, HN, but I can recognize yet another attempt to stir the pot on the at-least-once message delivery guarantee debate.
shadowgovt 7 days ago [-]
This is the right take on this topic.
segmondy 8 days ago [-]
What happens if someone votes and dies before the vote is tallied?
bradyat 8 days ago [-]
Funny, I too searched this question earlier today. Presumably OP also was wondering what happens if Jimmy Carter dies before Election Day.
more_corn 8 days ago [-]
Carter’s son asked him “dad are you trying to live to be a hundred” to which he relied “no I’m trying to live long enough to vote for Kamala Harris”. I think he lives in Georgia so that’s where the relevant state law would apply.
itsdrewmiller 8 days ago [-]
There are a lot of comments on this post treating it like a question to them (that they are annoyed with!) rather than a link to an article explaining what happens.
masteruvpuppetz 8 days ago [-]
The real question.. what if someone dies just before the person who they voted for is announced a winner :(
hprotagonist 8 days ago [-]
as always, it depends on which state you’re in.
federalism, as a crude form of polyculture, is probably more boon than bane.
pjkundert 8 days ago [-]
[flagged]
schmidtleonard 8 days ago [-]
Mmmhmm.
The researchers paid by Trump’s team had “high confidence”
that 12 ballots were cast in the names of deceased
people in Clark County, Nev., and believed the
“high end potential exposure” was 20 voters statewide
— some 1,486 fewer than Trump’s lawyers said.
So Texas just did this: “Of those scrubbed from voter rolls, the state said more than 457,000 — nearly 40% — are deceased, …” [1]
But, you’re highly confident that they are the only jurisdictions with similar voting roll issues? And that none of these have been voted? How do you establish your level of confidence?
Because the name of every person who votes is recorded (at least in my state, and I'm pretty sure that's every state to detect double-voting). That's how, incidentally, the parties know to hound you if you stop showing up.
It should be very straightforward to compare the purged names with death certificates with voting history; a state government should have access to all that data, though it may cost money to collate it.
Did Texas do that? What did they find when they did? I feel like if they'd found something we'd have heard about it by now.
Dead people still being on the voting roster has never been a problem because, in practice, the amount of fraudulent voting under another person's name is always low. Do we have reason to believe that has changed?
8 days ago [-]
chrisco255 8 days ago [-]
[flagged]
schmidtleonard 8 days ago [-]
> we have no way of validating the computation without a paper based audit
Which is why the machines have a paper based audit system that gets tons of public scrutiny every time things get close.
chrisco255 8 days ago [-]
I'm talking a paper ballot where you physically mark your vote, not the modern systems that print out a QR code receipt, that have been shown to be subject to hacks and manipulations. They can be manipulated in the tally and in the production of the QR code.
> Dead people's ballots get cast all the time. Even if the rules disallow it
That sounds like a problem, but for it to actually BE a problem a meaningful amount of votes need to be cast this way. When people look into this, they find that problem is well below the threshold of actually changing the result of any election
chrisco255 8 days ago [-]
The 2000 election was decided by 500 votes. So the threshold of concern for me, is any more than 0.
bandyaboot 8 days ago [-]
Classic case of a solution in search of a problem.
lupusreal 8 days ago [-]
> paper ballots
Pottery sherds or I'm not voting.
stonogo 8 days ago [-]
And yet the entire west coast has been doing voting by mail (and in some instances ballot dropboxes) for years and years with almost no fraud and auditable processes.
Provide data about your claims regarding "most precincts" or take your propaganda somewhere else.
chrisco255 8 days ago [-]
Voter roll purges happen in batches in part because they are labor intensive and are also subject to review and suits from many conflicting parties:
There should be an HN filter that rewrites "what happens if?" to "what happens when." titles to preempt all the low effort answers.
dang 8 days ago [-]
Unfortunately that edit would put the title over the 80 char limit in this case.
agubelu 8 days ago [-]
The same thing as if someone votes and then gets ran over by a car as they walk out of the polling station. If the vote was legally emitted, it's counted.
Sniffnoy 8 days ago [-]
You should actually read the article (which says that it depends on the state) rather than just stating what you might expect to be true!
more_corn 8 days ago [-]
Depends on the state.
Rendered at 21:51:12 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I suppose there's some noise in any voting system, and it's fine if the magnitude is small and its distribution random. Looking at the US, I'd be more worried about gerrymandering than a few votes from the dead.
This is the right answer. It's amazing how many people insist that elections have absolutely no fraud or other sources of error. In most elections throughout the world, it's apes counting paper with their squishy hands and blurry eyeballs. It's remarkable that we even get 3 significant figures reliably.
Voting matters. Individuals matter.
We should aim for no one being 100% wrong
Then again, I disagree with him. It’s just he was a customer.
Please correct this sentence.
If someplace permits early voting, then I don't see a moral or ethical justification for nullifying a vote cast by someone who's already legally cast those votes and submitted that ballot, which is now out of their hands and in custody of the State.
If they want to disenfranchise dead people, then discontinue mail-ins and early voting, and compel everyone to show up in person again.
(I detested in-person election days, because I do all my research ahead of time with actual ballot in hand, and I'd never make good decisions in a claustrophobic little box, standing up, with dozens in line waiting for me.)
> Missouri prohibits such ballots from being counted if it is proven that the voter died before polls opened and the ballot envelope has not yet been opened.
It seems reasonable to me that to be an eligible voter in an election, you must be alive. A ballot filled out in advance is merely a piece of paper until it is officially cast by an eligible voter on election day. If a voter dies before the polls open and there is a system in place to detect this, their vote should not be counted because they are no longer eligible. Conversely, if the voter is alive even one second after the polls open, their vote should be counted.
If we consider voting to be a period of weeks rather than a day (absentee, early voting & election day), then any vote cast legally during that time is valid, and we don't have to have edge cases where a vote was initially valid, but then invalid, but yet have no way to actually remove them.
What's worse is then people argue that we should make Election Day a national holiday, as if that would actually improve turnout (HINT: Ask your local retail, food, or other service worker how easy it is for them to get other holidays like Labor Day or Memorial Day off)
Mail-in voting is great, but I acknowledge that a lot of people don't trust it.
So why don't we do the actual best thing? Make voting open for multiple days. If you need to vote in person, then it only makes sense to keep polls open long enough so that no matter what job you do, no matter what shift you work, you should be able to find the time to vote.
IMO, making the polls open 24 hours for 3 days, or maybe 9 AM to 9 PM for a week, should cover basically everyone except those that travel a lot for their jobs (ie, long haul truckers), but they'd be voting absentee anyways.
We even have a category for it now: essential workers would be the only ones who aren't banned.
So the short answer is "yes; states disagreed on whether it was secure." The longer answer is that states that were doing it didn't have any mathematically-detectable fraud patterns distinguishing them from states that didn't, and states that just started in 2016 didn't seem to have any major systemic execution issues that would suggest fraud occurred.
If the County Elections Office doesn't learn someone died before their ballot is decanted into the general collection for counting, that's it. No way at that point to pull the ballot back out because the source of the vote is anonymous.
federalism, as a crude form of polyculture, is probably more boon than bane.
But, you’re highly confident that they are the only jurisdictions with similar voting roll issues? And that none of these have been voted? How do you establish your level of confidence?
1: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/el...
It should be very straightforward to compare the purged names with death certificates with voting history; a state government should have access to all that data, though it may cost money to collate it.
Did Texas do that? What did they find when they did? I feel like if they'd found something we'd have heard about it by now.
Dead people still being on the voting roster has never been a problem because, in practice, the amount of fraudulent voting under another person's name is always low. Do we have reason to believe that has changed?
Which is why the machines have a paper based audit system that gets tons of public scrutiny every time things get close.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/12/hackers-vulnerabili...
https://web.archive.org/web/20190224163525/http://lwvsc.org/...
https://securiosa.com/posts/northampton_problems_2023.html
That sounds like a problem, but for it to actually BE a problem a meaningful amount of votes need to be cast this way. When people look into this, they find that problem is well below the threshold of actually changing the result of any election
Pottery sherds or I'm not voting.
Provide data about your claims regarding "most precincts" or take your propaganda somewhere else.
https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/ensure-every-american-c...
https://wtop.com/virginia/2023/04/virginia-discovers-nearly-...
https://apnews.com/general-news-0cf5d8cd0d3a43f6abc5f5e2a80c...
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/27/nx-s1-5131578/alabama-nonciti...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-texas-elections/judge...
https://stateline.org/2019/10/25/the-messy-politics-of-voter...
They do not happen in real time.