The oldest known American was born in 1905. This list seems hit-or-miss, but I spot checked a few entries with birth years before that (excluding Jan 1900 since that might be used as NULL) and it showed them as having voted via absentee ballot. I don't know if the number is large enough to make any meaningful difference, but it's not a good look.
I've seen this explanation, but it's gaslighting. It says:
> No ballot for the 118-year-old Mr. Bradley was ever requested, received or counted.
Yet, the voter registration site clearly showed that a ballot was requested, sent to, and received from the elder Mr. Bradley. I'm skeptical that they would have detected the error had this particular case not gone viral. If they had the means to detect the error, then why didn't they do it before sending the ballot? Or, even better, remove the defunct registration in the first place?
Depends on how bad you consider the issue:
1) Ballot is sent to dead person -> not great, but I think this is apparently not illegal (and makes sense, since people don't die on schedules, and don't need to notify voter registration when they do)
2) Ballot also sent to alive person at same address with same name -> good
3) Living person fills out their ballot, turns it in -> good
4) Living person throws out dead person's ballot -> good
5) Vote counting accidentally records Living person's vote under Dead person's entry -> bad, but pretty easy to imagine as clerical error
6) Living person's entry never has a vote counted -> good (sort of, as living person's vote only gets counted once, just under wrong name
Result:
A) No change in voting results (living person's vote gets counted once)
But
B) Is this fraud? -> my opinion, no. There was no difference in vote count, likely no intention to make the mistake. If it was intentional fraud that's pretty useless
C) Is this system? -> Not sure, the list of thousands of 'possible dead people' certainly looks like worth investigating, but unless some real reports are gonna go look at every one I'm not sure there's gonna be a real answer for all of them
"If they had the means to detect the error" -> quite possibly because they're busy doing other things, like counting the votes. "skeptical that they would have detected the error" is pretty speculative, but again an error that results in no vote count difference is not the kind they should be correcting. They should focus on correcting errors that affect the vote count, right? (ie, execute the main thread rather than spend cycles garbage collecting. Garbage collect when the main thread is idle.)
