For 30 years, I have wondered, with mild amusement, whether my father committed a slight case of election fraud in the last days of his life.
I have now looked it up and learned the answer. His vote was perfectly legal in the state where he lived. If someone had helped him, that would have been legal also.
In 1996, my father voted absentee several days before Election Day. The ballot was mailed. Then he died before Election Day. He had been in fragile health and his passing was expected, but of course nobody knew exactly when.
In spite of his declining health, Dad was motivated to vote because he supported President Bill Clinton, but even more because a cousin of ours was a prominent Clinton fundraiser. Dad was hoping our cousin would do well in the next administration.
I’ve been curious whether that vote was legal. I also recognized that there’s no reasonable way Dad could have violated any law.
When a voter votes absentee, the ballot is placed in an inner envelope with no personal identification, to protect the voter’s anonymity, and an outer envelope with the voter’s identification information, to enable the county clerk to check the legitimacy of the voter and record that the vote occurred. Somebody – the voter or a helper -- puts the sealed envelopes in the mail or a drop box, or might deliver the package to the county clerk’s office. After the ballot arrives, the outer envelope is separated from the inner envelope so the vote is counted anonymously.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, ten states have laws permitting ballots to be counted when the voter has died before Election Day. Twelve states prohibit counting that ballot if it can be isolated, with variations based on the understanding that once the envelopes are separated, there’s no way to pull the deceased voter’s ballot out of the pile. A few other states have more complicated requirements, and the remaining 23 states have no specific laws on the topic.
New Mexico is one of the states with no law. An earlier law prohibiting counting the dead person’s ballot was repealed in 1999. The repeal left Paragraph §1-6-17 of the New Mexico statutes blank.
A few election experts, including a former state elections chief and a current election judge, assured me that the ballot of a person who voted legally and then died before Election Day is counted, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
What led me to this inquiry was a news report that a New Mexico man has been indicted by the US Attorney for delivering his dead wife’s ballot to the county clerk’s office. The Oct. 9 press release says Patrick Perea of Tijeras “attempted to cast his deceased wife’s absentee ballot in the November 2024 general election by submitting it to the Bureau of Elections of the Bernalillo County Clerk’s Office in Albuquerque.” The release says the staff intercepted the ballot before it could be counted.
The curious language of this news release implies that the man was indicted not for voting fraudulently but for delivering the absentee ballot. Further news reports indicate that the wife had died several months earlier and therefore the ballot appears to have been fraudulently filled out.
Maintaining up-to-date voting rolls is part of the clerk’s job. It appears the clerk’s staff did just what they are supposed to do, and New Mexico voters have one more reason to be confident in our elections.
This case helps to remind us where the line is drawn. This event may have been a deliberate attempt to cast an illegal vote. But if your grandma voted herself and you took her ballot to the mailbox, that’s a completely different situation.
Merilee Dannemann’s columns are posted at www.triplespacedagain.com. Comments are invited through the web site.