News
Bysiewicz oversees major cleanup of voter rolls
By Secretary of the State's Office
May 14, 2008 - 1:32:18 PM

Secretary of the State Hammers Final Nail in Coffin on Dead Voter Issue

Hartford: Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz today announced that over the last three weeks her office oversaw a major cleanup of Connecticut’s local voter rolls. As a result thousands of deceased voters have been removed from voter lists in advance of November’s presidential election.

“Three weeks ago I asked local elections officials to step up to the plate and investigate. They responded quickly and effectively to clean up the voter rolls,” said Bysiewicz. “Since April 20th, at the direction of my office, over 4,700 names of the deceased have been removed. This was a necessary act and major effort to ensure that integrity and security of November’s election.”

The action was triggered as a result of an April 20, 2008 Hartford Courant story by University of Connecticut students claiming thousands of dead people were registered to vote. Since April 20th 80% of the deceased voters identified by the UCONN have been removed from the voter rolls.

“This investigation has shown real systemic issues in how we track death information and get it to the Registrars of Voters so they can insure that we have accurate voter lists,” said Bysiewicz. “In many cases, local towns are not getting death information because town residents pass away out of town or out of state. This needs to be fixed, either through legislation or through our state’s Department of Public Health working with other states to share death information.”

In large part to identification requirements already in place, none of the information presented by the University of Connecticut found any voter fraud where someone deliberately tried to steal the identity of a deceased person and vote in their name.

In order to prevent deceased citizens from remaining on the voter rolls, the Office of the Secretary of the State will conduct a yearly match of names on our centralized Voter Registry with the CT Department of Public Health’s Master Death File. When a match is found the Office of the Secretary of the State will forward that information onto the local registrars of voters.

Number of ‘Dead Voters’ according to UCONN 8,558

Number of ‘Dead Voters’ already removed from active list 2,411

Number of voters removed after UCONN data but before 4/20/2008 438

Number of voters verified as Dead and REMOVED since 4/20/2008 4,745

Number of voters listed as dead but actually alive 45

Number of active voters listed as deceased but death was not verifiable 1,451

The Office of the Secretary of the State has asked Registrars of Voters to canvass the 1,451 names of the deceased on the active rolls and move them to inactive status before November, assuming they receive no response from the canvass.

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