Senate Bill S1688A

                                BILL NUMBER:S1688A

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 State Board of Elections
would be required to annually review the social security
administration death master file and notify the relevant local board
of elections of any and all deceased voters on their registration
roll. The local board of elections would then be required to remove
the deceased voter from the roll. 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. The
process requires that the New York City Department of Health and the
New York State Department of Health transmit a list of deceased
persons to the state board of elections. The State Board of Elections
              

then distributes the names to the relevant local boards for removal.
However, this list is not compiled in real time, nor does it consist
of the names of individuals who have died out of the state; no
mechanism currently exists to ensure that the name is in fact removed.

A 2012 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".

In October 2013, Newsday performed a computer analysis which showed
roughly 6,100 deceased persons are still registered to vote in Nassau
County, and 2,490 deceased persons are still registered to vote in
Suffolk County.  Of the 6,100 deceased persons in Nassau County, 270
of them actually cast a ballot in Nassau County after dying. Nassau
County has more deceased voters on their registration roll than any
other county in the state; a quarter of the 26,500 deceased voters
still registered to vote in the state are enrolled in Nassau County.
Furthermore, a New York City Board of Elections report released
December 30, 2013 showed that investigators posing as deceased voters
were allowed to cast 39 ballots during the November 2013 election.
Inaccurate voter registration rolls not only enable fraudulent


activity, but may also result in inaccurate precinct boundaries. The
loss of voter trust in the electoral system undermines our democratic
process.

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

FISCAL IMPLICATIONS: None to the State.

PRIOR LEGISLATIVE HISTORY:  2012 -- Rules

EFFECTIVE DATE: This act shall take effect immediately.