UPDATED: Dead MA voters to decide Brown/Coakley race?

With MA leading the nation of “deadwood” voters on their registration rolls, it’s entirely possible that the Brown/Coakley race could be decided “from the beyond”, so to speak.

In Nov 2009, CNS News reported on the study done by Aristotle, Inc that noted:

In Massachusetts, 116,483 registered voters are dead, 3.38 percent of the state’s total of registered voters. Another 538,567, or 15.6 percent, had moved to an area outside of where they are registered to vote.

When you consider that uber-progressive Ed Schultz admitted he’d have no moral problems committing voter fraud in order to defeat Brown on his Jan 15th radio show, the potential for massive voter fraud in the MA special election looms large.

UPDATE Today Ed Schultz corrected himself.

Schultz today said that was not exactly the message he had wanted to convey: “I misspoke on Friday. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I meant to say if I could vote 20 times — that’s what I would do.”

Gotta love it when an MSNBC employee and radio host can brag about a wish to commit voter fraud… not once or ten times, but twenty times.

END UPDATE

While there are many ways Dems can (and will) mount a challenge to a Brown win, the most obvious is the recount stall tactic. Via MA election law, any determined win of more than 1/2% of the turnout vote renders a recount request void. If we use the the Commonwealth’s voter breakdown as of October 2008, there are 2,078,610 registered voters in MA. This makes the magic 1/2% number margin, (assuming full voter turnout and not including additional registration) at approx 10,393 votes.

This includes receipt and counting of all absentee and overseas military votes, by law allowing for 10 days post election day. This also means it could be dice’y business when you consider that 11 times that 1/2% margin number could be fraudulent ballots, cast from beyond the grave.

So far, I have not found viable statistics on what percentage of these registered voters fall into the absentee/military category. However military estimates are possible if we use the numbers from a Nov 2009 survey of Uniformed and Overseas Citizens voters, from Massachusetts, 16,900 ballots were transmitted… 10,568 of those were a one time request for ballots. Also noted in the survey is that MA was one of eight states that sent more ballots to civilian voters than uniformed personnel.

If this special election follows the path of the 2008 election, the absentee/military ballots will pay a major role in the final count, and it’s unlikely the special election seven day certification is possible for a Brown win.

But in light of the existing facts, it could be a long certification process unless Brown can easily count “the dead”, as well as the absentee/military votes, in his column right out of the gate.