1/ Long Thread: There are way too many tweets out there proclaiming there’s “proof” a bunch of dead people voted. These people don’t know what they are talking about. Let me explain. We tend to think of death as binary. I’m dead or I’m not dead yet.

2/ That’s just not the case in the digital world. You live on way longer than your physical body. Now, let’s set aside, “Dude mailed in his ballot on 10/5 and got hit by a bus on 10/6” because that’s not what I’m talking about here.

3/ How voter data and registrations are managed varies by state, for purposes of this thread let’s assume that each county manages their own voter roll and a person stays registered as long as they vote every four years.

4/ An imaginary person steps out into the street and BLAMMO gets hit by a bus. It’s not like the doctor says, “Time of death is 9:36 am. Now time to call every entity that Flatty here interacted with in their entire life.”

5/ A death certificate is filed and eventually, that information makes it to the Social Security Administration. The SSA maintains the Social Security Master Death File. But get this, not everyone makes it into the Master Death File.

6/ Why not? Because that file is really about paying people benefits, not about tracking every dead person in the United States. So if our unfortunate friend was single and say, twenty-eight, they might get put into the “enter these when

7/ you have time pile.” There is never time for that pile. When someone claims, “we compared this list of voters to the SSA Master Death File and found FRAUD!” They don’t know what they are talking about while trying to sound important.

8/ There’s more. The big data compilers take the Master Death File and enhance it with their proprietary data. So it improves the quality of the list, however there are still challenges. Trusts, forwarded mail, juniors & seniors are

9/ all a giant mess for matching the data. We did deceased processing for a specialty catalog and they swore up and down that a person we flagged as deceased, was actually alive because they had just purchased something.

10/ Turns out the family carried on grandpa’s tradition of getting a Christmas train every year and just never bothered to take grandpa’s name off the orders. Anyway, back to voters.

11/ You have an imperfect file, how do you find the dead people? Each county (or the state, on behalf of the counties) processed their voter files through a couple of steps to get things accurate and up-to-date before mailing voter *stuff*

12/ First addresses standardized to USPS guidelines. Then names and addresses go through NCOALink to find any change of addresses filed with the USPS. That updated file is then processed to flag deceased records.

13/ This is usually just a match on first, last and address. Not every compiler retains the SSN and not every voter registration file requires it. George Foreman’s trust is gonna be a digital nightmare. In other words,

14/ if Flatty Hitbybus is actually Flatty Hitbybus, Jr. and their post-death address is changed to Flatty Hitbybus, Sr’s house. You would get a false positive on your match. So then the question is, “Do you want to purge false positives

15/ from your voter rolls?” Most Republicans historically have said yes (we’ve seen those stories) while most election officials are more cautious because get this, dead people eventually fall off voter rolls by not voting *gasp*

16/ And, it’s not cheap to process address standardization, NCOALink and deceased matching. So most counties (or states) only do it when the mailing season kicks off for an election. This doesn’t happen every day, week, month or even year

17/ If you only have big elections every two years, a state or country might process the file in February or March and say “that’s good enough for this election” and generally it is. But if the state processes in March and then you compare

18/ It to a file processed in November, of course you are going to find more dead people because shockingly and not so shockingly, people die all the time. Terrible, right? So, did those people vote? The likelihood is pretty low.

19/ Counties and states generally do duplicate address matching on their files and certainly you could sneak in one mail-in ballot for Flatty, but if there are 19 ballots going to one address, it’s gonna be noticed. The funny thing about

20/ dead people is that, unless they are ghosts, they don’t need their homes anymore and new people move in making the whole dead people voting by mail something we’d be seeing more examples of when the ballot arrived at the house rather

21/ rather than some attorney yelling, “I found dead people on this list of registered voters. FRAUD!” Every ballot tells a story, it’s pretty rare when it’s a ghost story. The end.