Voter fraud group comes up with a list of dead voters

A Raleigh-based group out to prove there’s a potential for widespread voter fraud has presented the Wake County Board of Elections with a list of 386 names that it says represents dead people who are still listed as eligible to vote in the county.

The Voter Integrity Project says it obtained the death records compiled by the state Department of Health and Human Services and compared it to Wake County voter registrations.

Wake’s deputy elections director, Gary Sims, says there is a time gap between the time DHHS gives its death database to the state Board of Elections, which then helps the county boards identify voters whose names should be removed.

Sims said the Wake board would go over this list, as it would do with any such information brought to its attention, and attempt to match every name with a date of birth from its own records.

“Our biggest fear is going to be disenfranchising voters,” Sims said. “It’s not just a random process. We have to make sure who we’re removing is who we’re removing.”

The Voter Integrity Project says its research director gathered the names of deceased registered voters while working on Tea Party-supported congressional candidate Bill Randall’s campaign in 2010, and brought it to the board’s attention then. Seventy-four of those names were still on the voter rolls, the group says.

Earlier this month, the organization sued to have 528 Wake County residents it claims are not U.S. citizens removed from the voter registration. The elections board had investigated the complaint and found that 510 of the voters were citizens and eligible to vote. It scheduled a hearing for the 18 others.

The Voter Integrity Project describes itself as a nonpartisan group. It supports requiring photo identification to vote, which is a controversy that finds Republicans supporting the idea and Democrats opposing it.

Earlier in the week, the group asked Alamance County to remove 123 voters and Halifax County to remove 77 voters it says have died.