BILL NUMBER:S7687

TITLE OF BILL:
An act
to amend the election law, in relation to removal of a
voter from voting
rolls due to death

PURPOSE OF BILL:
The purpose of this bill is to ensure that the name of a deceased
person is removed from the voting roll upon their death.

SUMMARY OF PROVISIONS:
Section One amends article five of the election law as it pertains to
the registration and enrollment of voters by adding a new section
5-714. The Board of Elections for each county and in the City of New
York would be required to annually review the social security
administration death master file and remove the names of any and all
deceased voters. A safeguard exists to allow an individual to vote
via affidavit ballot in the event that their name is erroneously
removed from the voting roll.

Section Two contains the effective date.

JUSTIFICATION:
The Election Law currently provides that the name of a voter must be
              

removed from the registration roll upon their death. However, no
mechanism exists to ensure that their name is in fact removed.

A new report by the Pew Center on the States finds that more than 1.8
million dead people are registered to vote throughout the country.
This raises the concern that our election system may be vulnerable to
fraud. It is imperative that our voters have confidence in our
election system.

A study conducted by the Poughkeepsie Journal in October 2006 of the
New York State voting database found that the list contained the
names of as many as 77,000 deceased individuals, and that as many as
2,600 of them had cast votes from the grave. The analysis consisted
of the matching of names, dates of birth, and zip codes of registered
voters against the same information in the Social Security
Administration "Death Master File".

This bill also protects voters who may be erroneously removed from the
voter registration roll by allowing them to vote via an affidavit
ballot in the same manner that an inactive voter would be permitted
to vote.

While it is true that the New York City Department of Health and the
New York State Department of Health currently transmit a list of
deceased persons to the state board of elections, for removal from
the list of eligible voters,
this list is not compiled in real time, nor does it consist of the
names of individuals who have died out of the state.

FISCAL IMPLICATIONS:


None to the State.

PRIOR LEGISLATIVE HISTORY:
New Bill.

EFFECTIVE DATE:
This act shall take effect immediately.