Dead Man Voting

Every election season, Republicans complain endlessly about the graveyard vote. The prevailing Republican assumption seems to be that the dead vote Democratic, and that this is a bad thing. It is time to put this necrophobic assumption to rest.

The 14th Amendment only allows states to deny "the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof" to persons who are either:

• non-citizens of the USA
• non-Residents of the state
• Participants in a rebellion
• Or under 21 years of age (subsequently reduced to 18 years of age)
• (sex is no longer an allowable criterion for voting)

There is absolutely nothing in the constitution that allows states to deny someone the right to vote simply because they are dead. Necrophobic restrictions of voting rights to the living clearly violates equal protection. If we deny the dead the right to vote, soon we will be denying the comatose, and then the bedridden, and then it will get down to disfranchizing people with mere cases of the sniffles.

Republicans have exploited the 14th amendment "criminal" loophole to disfranchize felons, but there is no constitutional basis for disfranchizing the dead. Republican necrophobes would need a Constitutional amendment to limit voting rights to people with a pulse.

One back-door approach that Republicans have used to try to disfranchize the dead, is requiring the actual dead person to physically vote in person. The pretense here is that voting in person is a "neutral" requirement that supposedly does not specifically target the dead. However, this is de facto disenfranchizement, since the requirement makes it impossible for the dead to actually vote.

Another, even more sinister argument, is that dead people cannot, by definition, vote. This argument is circular, a shameful argument to avoid equal protection analysis, because the necrophobic definition of voting is precisely what is in question here. The traditional definition of voting is obsolete and unnecessary, since the Florida Supreme Court held in Bush v. Gore that in absence of a ballot marked personally by the voter, an appointed election committee should be able to determine the "clear intent of the voter." Given this progressive consciousness-neutral definition of voting, there is no reason why voting rights should be restricted to the living.