The Grim Voter

Drudge links to a Journal News story about the voting dead. The paper reports on an effective bit of high comedy investigative journalism:

The [Poughkeepsie] Journal's analysis of New York's 3-month-old database is the first to determine the potential for errors and fraud in voting. It matched names, dates of birth and ZIP codes in the state's database of 11.7 million voter registration records against the same information in the Social Security Administration's "Death Master File."

What I want to know is how one can become a Death Master!

It seems this Death Master is ordering his peons to vote:

A new statewide database of registered voters contains as many as 77,000 dead people on its rolls, and as many as 2,600 of them have cast votes from the grave, according to a Poughkeepsie Journal computer-assisted analysis.

Nor is the Death Master nonpartisan:

Democrats who cast votes after they died outnumbered Republicans by more than 4 to 1.

But it turns out that being Death Master isn't all it's cracked up to be:

In most cases, instances of dead voters can be attributed to database mismatches and clerical errors. For instance, the Social Security Administration admits there are people in its master death index who are not dead.

They include Wappingers Falls resident Hilde Stafford, an 85-year-old native of Germany. The master index lists her date of death as June 15, 1997.

"I'm still alive," she said. "I still vote."

Or, as James Taranto would say, Hilde Stafford is still not dead.