mollyfamwatA 20-year-old girl who fought bone cancer for 10 years was passionately involved in politics, remembers her mother Tiffany Pflugoft. And after the last by-election in the hospital after a bone marrow transplant, she decided to vote this year.
Your ballot will now be cast in accordance with the electoral laws of the state of Wisconsin. He is one of dozens of Wisconsinians whose votes are cancelled because they died after the early vote, according to the State Electoral Commission provided by CNN through a request for public registers.
She was very excited about what Tiffany said this week. She died on Monday, but on Saturday, when she could still talk, she told all the nurses and doctors: I voted.
We never realized it didn’t matter, she said.
Throughout the country, the states were divided on whether or not to count the votes of those who had voted early and died before election day. At least a dozen states allow it, more than a dozen other states are against it, and the laws of the other states are unclear, as a recent study by the National Conference of State Lawmakers has shown.
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Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, which are among the largest states, do not count votes cast by voters who die before election day, while Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Ohio count votes, according to the NCSL and state election officials.
This year, when a record number of Americans voted early and coronaviruses and deaths were reported in some states, this is not just a speculative topic. The rules mean that even when Kovid-19 became the defining subject of the presidential campaign, in some states the voters who die as a result of the pandemic do not count their votes.
The voice of a coronavirus victim is not counted.
Marvin Tillman, an 84-year-old retiree from Chilton, a city of about 4,000 people located between Milwaukee and Green Bay, died this month of coronavirus after being sent in his report card, state archives and his family said. Tillman was a strong supporter of President Donald Trump and, according to his wife Mildred Tillman, he made sure his ballot paper was filled out before he went to the hospital.
I don’t understand why that doesn’t count, Mildred. It was important to him.
During the pandemic, a couple – a high school student who had been together for 62 years – paid attention to the masks and stayed at home as long as possible, according to Mildred. But one morning last month, Marvin, who had heart problems and diabetes, woke up screaming that he couldn’t breathe. Mildred took him to the hospital where Covid-19 was diagnosed and stayed there for the next three weeks. Although they called and talked every day, she couldn’t see him in person until the day he died.
As a former O’Lakes Country supervisor, Marvin loved to travel the streets, and the couple had been to every state except Alaska, Mildred said. He reads his local newspaper every day from front and back and especially liked the sports section.
Despite his illness, Marvin Trump was not responsible for managing the pandemic and wants his vote for the president to be counted, Mildred said.
He thought Trump had done everything he could because it was a global problem, she said. No one can change what happened.
Because Trump and his allies wanted to spread the fear of electoral fraud, they often raised the spectre of malicious actors using dead voter registration to vote.
There have been isolated cases of attempted fraud involving deceased voters. Election officials in Broward County, Florida, said Friday they received about 50 fake voter registration applications, most of which contained people’s names confirmed deaths and all postmarks from Colombia, South Carolina, with no return address.
Someone went to a lot of trouble to use the system and got caught, said Steven Vancore, election critic for Broward County. There seems to be no attempt to get this man to vote.
According to experts investigating this problem, electoral fraud is generally extremely rare. An extensive study carried out by the Brennan Centre for Justice in 2007 showed that the fraud rate ranged from 0.0003% to 0.0025%, and other studies came to similar conclusions.
Any study that tries to determine the frequency of this type of fraud leads to the conclusion that people very rarely try to commit electoral fraud, says Sean Morales-Doyle, Assistant Director of the Voter Rights and Elections Program at the Brennan Centre. But the rhetoric of fraud tends to justify anti-election policies, such as restrictive laws on photo ID cards, more searches on voter lists or restrictions on postal voting, he argued.
Many states that deny the right to vote to voters who die before polling day regularly check the death certificates to update their voter registers and remove deceased voters. However, ballots in these states can be miscalculated if voters do not realise that a voter died before election day. And once the vote has been processed and removed from the envelope of the absent voter, it is likely to be extremely difficult to trace.
Wendy Underhill, head of the Elections and Constitutional Amendment Department of the National Conference of State Legislators, which deals with legislation, said that those who accept and reject the votes of deceased voters have a valid argument.
One way is on Election Day, and if you are not with us on Election Day, your vote will not be counted. Another thing is that your vote counts when you’re in the early vote, she said. States move in both directions.
Reed Magney of the Wisconsin State Election Commission said there was no ambiguity in the state law on this issue.
As our hearts go out to those who have lost loved ones, Wisconsin law clearly states that absent ballots cannot be counted if a voter dies before election day, Magnie said. The law hasn’t changed.
could have encouraged them to stick to.
For most of the family members who spoke CNN, the idea that their loved ones’ ballots would not be counted was a complete surprise. Marion Roose Weiss, 86, a resident of Northern Du Lac Foundation, Wisconsin, who died earlier this month, took part in all the elections, her daughter said.
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I’m sure she would be very, very angry if she knew that her voice was no longer counted, her daughter Linda Rus-Stutz said. It might encourage her to hold out a little longer if she knew.
Rus Weiss, who worked for many years as a cafeteria and accountant in the local school system and loved baking and gardening, was generally elected a Republican. But she was not satisfied with the lack of respect for people and spoke very openly about racism and injustice, her daughter said.
After she had left the absent ballot box on the table for a few weeks, she finally filled it in early this month, her daughter said. She didn’t want her daughter to see who she was voting for, but the way she talked about her decision made Rus-Stutz think she was voting for former Vice President Joe Biden, she said.
She used to talk a lot: I want my old country back, I want my old world back, Rus-Stutz said.
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Florence Sobralskie, who died in early October at the age of 95, had, according to her daughter Maria Sobralskie, worked for many years as a volunteer in her community in the center of Wisconsin, Berlin, or in the nearby city of Aurora.
I don’t know if they had a voter card at the time, but she didn’t have to check it – she knew everyone, Mary said.
Florence, who raised six children and once worked as a furrier, has been very attentive to politics and spoke with admiration of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in the presidential election earlier this year, condemning the Capricorn, Mary said. According to state reports, his ballot arrived at the local polling station a few days before his death.
She’d be very unhappy if she knew her voice didn’t count, Mary said.
She wanted to change somethingShe wanted to change something
According to family members, many of Wisconsin’s deceased voters have participated in every election for decades. But Amber Pfluhoft, a 20-year-old cancer victim living in the suburb of Milwaukee West Bend, was an exception.
In preparation for her first presidential election, Amber visited the websites Trump and Biden and talked about politics with friends.
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She even had some experience with self-management when she went to Washington, D.C., on a trip organized by a camp for children with cancer, and lobbied the authorities for more money for children’s cancer research, her mother said.
Although Amber shared a lot with her mother, there’s one thing she didn’t tell her: who she chose.
She appreciated that the voting process was secret, that this is what you have in front of you, Tiffany said. She wanted to change something in her voice, and it’s sad she couldn’t.
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