I can’t lie. When I first heard former President Trump’s claim that dead people were casting ballots in the election, my imagination raced. In my head, Zombies rose out of the grave on Election day; they headed to a ballot place and started pressing buttons. Then, I thought, if this was even remotely true, what would Trump’s campaign pitch be to swing the Walking Dead vote in his favor.
Back to reality. On a call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office on January 2, Trump tried to overturn the election stating this craziness:
“The other thing, dead people. So dead people voted. And I think the number is in the ... close to 5,000 people,” Mr Trump told Mr Raffensperger. “And they went to obituaries. They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number. And a minimum is close to about 5,000 voters.”
Well, some newspaper reporters did some counting and low and behold, it’s not 5,000. It’s not even close to that number.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that just four of the over 4 million ballots cast were signed by a voter who had died, all of them sent by relatives of the deceased. To add further:
In one case, a 74-year-old widow submitted an absentee ballot on behalf of her husband, William Nelson, after he died in September 2020.
“He was going to vote Republican, and she said, ‘Well, I’m going to cancel your ballot because I’m voting Democrat.’ It was kind of a joke between them,” Barry Bishop, an attorney for Sharon Nelson of Canton, told the State Election Board. “She received the absentee ballot and carried out his wishes. ... She now realizes that was not the thing to do.”
So, no, we don’t have to add the zombie party to the census just yet. It’s another lie about the 2020 election that we can file away in the case closed drawer.