Motor Voter Law Sparks Fraud

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.

Copyright 2000 by United Press International. All rights reserved.