The Citizen-Times did some fine reporting, recently disclosing that over 300 registered Asheville voters were dead. One guy had been dead for fourteen years.
Email posts in response to the article were amusing. Most shared stories from their personal experiences of bad record-keeping at the Board of Elections. Others wondered at the point of this article, which, like all C-T articles, must surely be agenda-driven.
This followed on the heels of the paper’s high praise for same-day voter registration, a practice anybody else thinks synonymous with fraud and corruption.
The article on dead voters said nothing about voters who move out of the county. Last year, when I offered to help the Republicans with some of their precinct call lists, fewer than one in five names had a valid phone number for somebody who still wanted to be affiliated with the party. (In my faded memory, it seems like one in twenty-five, but I’m being conservative here.)
To avoid the same ridicule tendered to the C-T article for failing to have a point, I will offer that it is ridiculous to assume same-day voter registrants who don’t uphold the honor system will be detected by those who would let people vote nineteen years after they move to another state or fourteen years after they die.
