Bring Out Your Dead ... On Election Day

This is just in one city. It may be impossible getting to the bottom of this, but it appears to be a nationawide plague that may well undermine democracy.

“I’m sorry, but she passed on two years ago,” said a mustached man wearing a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap and driving a motorized chair down the street. He was Linda Hill’s husband, Henderson Hill Jr.

Linda Kay Hill, a homemaker and Louisiana native, died Aug. 2, 2006, of a heart attack, her husband recalled, and is buried at Houston Memorial Gardens in Pearland. But Harris County voter records indicate she –- or someone using her identity –- cast a ballot in the November election that year. Linda Hill of Woodwick Street voted in person on Election Day, records show.

She is among the more than 4,000 people whose names are listed both on Harris County’s voter rolls and also in a federal database of death records, a Texas Watchdog analysis has found.

And dozens of those people, like Linda Hill, have apparently cast ballots from beyond the grave, records since 2004 show. One expert says the number of deceased names used to cast ballots may be higher than what Texas Watchdog’s analysis found.

Instances of dead voters’ names being used to cast ballots were most frequent in three elections, the November 2004 general election, the November 2006 general election and the March 2008 Democratic primary, the analysis found.

Less than a month away from an election to decide the highest office in the land, some advocates worry that such errors in the voter records open the door for fraud, compromise the integrity of results and lessen voter confidence in the system.

The findings come as the group ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has faced scrutiny in multiple states for allegedly improper voter registrations — including players for the Dallas Cowboys, not in the Lone Star State, but in Nevada. The group’s Nevada offices were raided by state officials earlier this week.