-By David Ferguson
September 21, 2012- On Thursday night’s edition of “The Rachel Maddow Show,” host Rachel Maddow discussed the fact that the supposed scandal of thousands of people casting votes under the names of dead people on voting day is a “phantom problem,” and alleged that it’s only urgent in the minds of people who want fewer people to vote.
In North Carolina, for example, where former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) and President Barack Obama are tied, 46 percent to 46 percent, according to recent polls, Maddow said that a “self-appointed, supposedly non-partisan tea party outfit” called the Voter Integrity Project has announced that 30,000 voters should be stripped from the polls.
The group presented the list of names to the North Carolina Board of Elections of Friday, insisting that the 30,000 individuals listed as current North Carolina voters are actually deceased, but are still registered to vote. Voter Integrity Project director Jay DeLancy believes that someone else could vote in the dead voter’s stead, raising the specter of voter fraud.
“But guess what!” said Maddow. “Not all of those people are dead.” North Carolina officials began to attempt to verify the list of names, and perhaps unsurprisingly, not many of them are actually deceased. Of 30,000, only 4,946 matched names on the actual voter rolls closely enough to warrant further investigation.
The Board of Elections began to send out letters to the supposedly dead voters, many of whom replied emphatically that they are very much among the living.
“So far North Carolina elections officials have found have found not a single instance, not one,” Maddow said, “of anybody on the tea party group’s challenge list who has voted when they were not supposed to vote.”