See: https://www.cisa.gov/rumorcontrol
Reality: Voter registration list maintenance and other election integrity measures protect against voting illegally on behalf of deceased individuals.
Rumor: Votes are being cast on behalf of dead people and these votes are being counted.
Get the Facts: State and Federal laws prohibit voter impersonation, including casting a ballot on behalf of a deceased individual. Election officials regularly remove deceased individuals from voter registration rolls based on death records shared by state vital statistics agencies and the Social Security Administration. While there can be some lag time between a person’s death and their removal from the voter registration list, which can lead to some mail-in ballots being delivered to addresses of deceased individuals, death records provide a strong audit trail to identify any illegal attempts to cast ballots on behalf of deceased individuals. Additional election integrity safeguards, including signature matching and information checks, further protect against voter impersonation and voting by ineligible persons.
In some instances, living persons may return mail-in ballots or vote early in-person, and then die before Election Day. Some states permit such voters’ ballots to be counted, while others disallow such ballots and follow procedures to identify and reject them during processing.
Taken out of context, some voter registration information may appear to suggest suspicious activity, but are actually innocuous clerical errors or the result of intended data practices. For example, election officials in some states use temporary placeholder data for registrants whose birth date or year is not known (e.g., 1/1/1900, which makes such registrants appear to be 120 years old). In other instances, a voting-age child with the same name and address as their deceased parent could be misinterpreted as a deceased voter or lead to clerical errors.
Useful Sources
18 U.S.C. § 1708
52 U.S.C. §§ 10307(c), 20507, 20511(2), 21083(a)(2)(A)