Dead voters

CITIZEN-TIMES.com: Dead voters in city were still registered: "The Citizen-Times requested a database of registered voters listed as Asheville residents as of July 12. We used a public records request, which anyone may use to find information maintained by the government. We downloaded a database of people listed as dead on Social Security records, focusing on people whose last residence was Asheville as of July 17.

The death records are cataloged by the RootsWeb.com site that specializes in genealogy research. The Citizen-Times matched the zip codes and names from the voter database with the same fields in Social Security database. The results were filtered by birth date and age. We took out matches that appeared to be mistakes, such as where a first name matched part of a last name.

In at least one case, the death records were wrong. A man named Louis Rice Jr. was alive. Such an occurrence is rare “but not unheard of,” said Social Security Administration spokesman Darryl Mull. Mull said sometimes there is confusion when people have similar names, such as children and parents with the same name. By the same token, sometimes a person who is dead may not be listed on the Social Security Administration’s records. The results were 347 records of people who were listed by the federal government as being dead and by the local government as being registered voter"