One of the favorite conspiracy theories of Trump supporters who falsely believe that Trump won the election (they can’t imagine anyone voting against him) is that “thousands of dead voters” voted for Biden.
Reporters for the BBC, a U.K.-based global news organization, conducted an unscientific but illustrative investigation of how these stories get started. In a word: Sloppy work by amateur sleuths. The BBC reporters started with this tweet:
From that list, they picked 30 names at random and added the oldest person on the list, for a total of 31 names, then set about trying to find those people.
They were able to contact 11 of them, confirmed another 17 are alive, and determined that 3 are dead. One of the 3 dead voters was alive when she mailed her ballot in September, but died before election day. Under Michigan election laws, her vote shouldn’t be counted, but she was entitled to vote when she sent in her ballot, so no fraud was committed.
In the other two cases, one involved a son that used his father’s ballot instead of his own ballot, which would invalidate his vote but isn’t voting twice (and could have resulted from confusion, as opposed to deliberately voting with a dead person’s ballot), and the other voted with his own ballot, but election officials erroneously ascribed it to his deceased father through a clerical error that was corrected. That vote obviously is legal and should count.
A person they found alive is “a 100-year-old woman who, according to the ‘dead voter’ list, had died in 1982” but “is currently living in a nursing home in Michigan” and therefore entitled to vote in that state. The fact someone was born in 1920 doesn’t automatically mean they’re not entitled to vote, or if they voted, that vote is fraudulent. You should check for a pulse before jumping to that conclusion.
The other cases involved mismatched names. BBC said, “Checking Michigan state public records, cross-referencing voter postal codes, we were able to find precise dates of birth for those who had voted – and as we had anticipated, they failed to match the dates of birth on the death records. So we … were dealing with two sets of people – those who had voted and those with the same name and age who had died elsewhere.”
BBC concluded, “Our selection of 31 cases is only a small sample of the 10,000 names on the list, but it has clearly revealed the flaws in the database shared by Trump supporters. From our investigation it’s clear that in almost all of our 31 test cases, the data for genuine voters in Michigan has been combined with records of dead people with the same name and birth month and year from across the United States to yield false matches.”
“If the lists are linked based on name and birth date alone, in a state the size of Michigan, you’re guaranteed to get false positives,” says Prof. Justin Levitt, an expert on the law of democracy.
And that, children, is how false conspiracy theories are born.
Read the BBC article here. For a story about Covid-19 vaccine rumors and conspiracy theories, click here.
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I would like to know how much time it took for the Newspaper to get through their 30 names, and I am not sure for a list of 10,000 names that is statically a large enough random group to test the 10,000 names. They did find one case of the dead voting and county officials should have pulled her ballot, but we don’t know if that happened. Rather sloppy reporting for them not to follow up with county voting authorities.
If you have a better analysis of that list of 10,000 names, let’s see it.