NY BOE Sends Dead Voters Absentee Ballots; Keeps Dead Voters on Rolls

The New York Board of Elections has kept deceased voters on the voter registration rolls and keeps sending them absentee ballots:

Queens resident Michelle Dimino has a simple request for the city’s Board of Elections: Please remove my late dad from the voter rolls. . . . “In 2013, 2014, 2015 and again this year, I received absentee ballots for my father. I could have fraudulently voted with those ballots, but I shredded them instead,” an exasperated Dimino told The Post.

Fortunately, this deceased voter's family is honest.  But unfortunately, the Board of Elections has kept Ms. Dimino's father on the voter registration rolls despite his family's efforts to have him removed:

What’s upsetting, Dimino said, is that she called the elections board shortly after her father’s death to ask that he be purged from the rolls. 

She said election workers insisted she would have to show up in person at an agency office with a death certificate to confirm her dad was no longer alive. 

Dimino, 48, told the workers she’s been on dialysis and asked if she could mail in her father’s death certificate to put the issue to rest. 

She says she was told she couldn’t [contrary to Board policy]. 

And this problem is not isolated to Ms. Dimino's father:

Queens resident Stewart Marden told The Post that the city’s Board of Elections has been sending him absentee ballots for his son, Russell, for the past eight years — even though the 38-year-old died of multiple sclerosis in 2008. 

Marden said he told the BOE that his son was dead in 2008. But he kept getting ballots for him. . . . 

The son of Helen Petersen, Jonathan, a Brooklynite who died in 2010 while suffering from dementia, shared a similar tale. . . . 

State law requires that the Board of Elections get monthly updates from the city Health Department on residents who died, a New York election official said. . . . The BOE declined to discuss its procedures for purging dead voters.

When concerned citizens do more to keep the voter registration rolls accurate than the Board of Elections and when the Board of Elections puts obstacles in the way of voter registration roll accuracy, it creates the opportunity for fraud.  As the Lawyers Democracy Fund notes, this is a common problem "that occurs when state and local election officials fail to identify and remove deceased voters from the voter rolls.  Absentee or mail ballots are sent year after year, election after election and the deceased person may remain on the rolls for decades."