COLUMBIA, SC (WIS) - The state Election Commission is all but done investigating whether a list of so-called "dead" voters might be an indication of voter fraud.
Last month, the commission began reviewing a list of 953 voters who appeared to have cast ballots after they died.
"The answer is out there because we have the voter registration list and the poll list from every election conducted in the state of South Carolina, so it's a matter of going back, looking at what the poll manager marked on the voter registration list, looking at the poll list, looking for that voter's signature and seeing if it matches their original voter registration application," said commission spokesman Chris Whitmire.
It turns out dead people listed on rolls of active voters is a nationwide problem as 1.8 million of them identified in a new study by the Pew Center. There are other inaccuracies in voter registration listings as 2.8 million actively registered in more than one state. At least 12 million registrations have serious errors.
But in South Carolina, the Election Commission has found simple explanations for those supposedly dead voters. Sometimes, they died after requesting absentee ballots.
The state recorded them as voting even if the ballots were not returned. In the majority of cases, the commission found nothing more than clerical errors. Poll workers, for instance, confusing senior and junior members of the same family.
The dead voter list, and other questions about voter registration have helped fuel efforts to require voter ID's. And critics of the voter ID law say that has led to potentially costly litigation.
"Our lawyers on the Common Cause board estimate it'll be somewhere between $1 and $3 million to litigate this and if it goes higher than that and goes to the Court of Appeals and goes to the Supreme Court, the numbers would become astronomical," said SC Common Cause's John Crangle.
Whitmire declined to appear on camera, but said the commission's findings will be turned over the state law enforcement division shortly. He says the results of the investigation will be released next Tuesday.
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