A spokesman for Secretary of State Cathy Cox said the federal Motor Voter
Law made it more difficult to remove ineligible voters from active voting
rolls.
Previously, county registrars purged people who had not voted for three
years. The law, implemented in Georgia in 1995, bans counties from dropping
a voter from the active rolls for not voting.
A review of public records by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and WSB-TV
indicated that 5,412 ballots have been cast by the dead in Georgia in local,
state and federal elections during the past two decades.
There are 15,198 dead individuals still on Georgia's voter rolls, the news
organizations said after analyzing state and federal death databases and the
Georgia Secretary of State's records of 3.6 million active voters and their
voting history.
In 1998, Georgia law began requiring voters to show photo identification
before voting, but a voter who has none can sign a statement under oath
swearing or affirming that he is the person identified on the
elector's voter certificate.
Dead voters have been part of Georgia's colorful political history. When
Herman Talmadge, later a U.S. senator, ran for governor in 1946, he received
dozens of absentee write-in ballots in his home base of Telfair County.
The 48 ballots, which made Talmadge the winner in the county, were in the
same handwriting, and many of them were cast on behalf of people who were
dead or never existed.
Because of the discrepancies, outgoing governor Ellis Arnall refused to
hand over the office, prompting Talmadge supporters to take the state
capitol by force.
And in 1997, a federal grand jury indicted 21 Dodge County residents in a
124-count indictment on charges of buying votes for two county commission
candidates and the incumbent sheriff.
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