But will his vote actually be viable?
As Election Day nears, so do growing allegations of voter fraud.
The latest came Thursday with a twist: A libertarian think tank in Portland said the state’s voter registration rolls may include the names of more than 6,000 dead people.
The Cascade Policy Institute based its charge on a comparison of names and dates of birth of Oregon registered voters with the Social Security Death Master File, a list of more than 84 million deceased Americans.
“We believe this has the potential for voter fraud being that Oregon is a vote-by-mail state,” Jeff Alan, Cascade’s chief investigator, said in a letter to state Elections Division Director John Lindback.
But the Elections Division, after matching the 6,142 names supplied by Cascade with the state voter registration database, came to a different conclusion.
Lindback said 4,998 of the names are classified as inactive or canceled voters and were not mailed ballots for the Nov. 4 general election. He said his staff randomly called 37 of the 1,144 remaining people who were classified as active voters and found that 16, or 43 percent, are alive and 21, or 57 percent, are deceased.
Lindback said that if that ratio held for the full list of 1,144 active voters that Cascade said may be dead, it would mean that ballots were mailed to about 650 deceased voters among Oregon’s more than 2.1 million active registered voters.
“That’s a pretty small number compared to our database. I don’t think they have uncovered anything here about a problem with the database or the system,” Lindback said.
First of all: They have a libertarian think tank in the People’s Republic of Portland? Who’d a thunk it?
Secondly, maybe Director Lindback was on a desert island back in 2004, but Washington’s Governor’s race was decided by a mere 129 votes.
“A pretty small number” of errors is currently, and always will be, more than “Zero” errors. Which is the actual number of errors the citizens of Oregon pay him and his department to make.
Director Lindback needs to be fired until he learns how to do simple math.