Voting from the grave offers salacious headlines, and investigators often attempt to match death records to voter rolls in an attempt to produce purported evidence of fraud. Yet in addition to the problems with inaccurate matching identified above, a simple match of death records to voter rolls may conceal citizens who voted before dying, in quite ordinary fashion. In Maryland in 1995, for example, an exhaustive investigation revealed that of 89 alleged deceased voters, none were actually dead at the time the ballot was cast. The federal agent in charge of the investigation said that the nearest they came was when they “found one person who had voted then died a week after the election.”36 Similarly, in New Hampshire, postcards were sent to the addresses of citizens who voted in the 2004 general election; one card was returned as undeliverable because the voter died after Election Day, but before the postcard arrived at her home.
