Should Obama's grandma's vote count?

by Frank James

When should a dead voter's vote count and when shouldn't it? The question arises because of the news today that the absentee vote cast by Sen. Barack Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, will be counted in Hawaii.

The reflexive answer is that it should never count. How can someone who's no longer among the living have a vote that counts like a living voter's? That would seem to be a violation of the constitutional requirement of one person, one vote.

But Slate's Trailhead blog explains why a vote by Obama's deceased grandmother will be counted:

So why was Dunham's vote allowed to count? Hawaii Chief Elections Officer Kevin Cronin tells Trailhead that, when an absentee voter dies, the ballot is not removed until Hawaii's Department of Health issues an official list of the names of deceased persons to the city clerk's office, which will not happen until later this month. Unlike Steen, who passed away several weeks prior to the election, the two-day turnaround in Dunham's case creates "a practical administrative problem," Cronin says, in fishing out her ballot out from among the tens of thousands of absentee ballots in Honolulu--even if her death had been officially reported by the Department of Health.

Robert Ichikawa, an attorney at the Honolulu firm Kobayashi, Sugita, and Goda, says the decision comes down to how one interprets the phrase "sufficient proof" in the law, saying the use of an official health department report is reasonable if applied consistently.

Even if Hawaii's four electoral votes were decided by one person's ballot, a challenge over Obama's grandmother could not throw the election. The law specifically states that "[t]he casting of any such ballot shall not invalidate the election."

As Slate also reports, there was another well-known dead-voter situation during the Democratic primaries:

A similar case cropped up during the Democratic primary, when a South Dakota woman named Florence Steen voted by absentee ballot for Hillary Clinton but passed away prior to the state's June 3 primary. (Clinton thanked Steen by name during a victory speech in West Virginia.) As Slate reported in a May 14 "Explainer," Steen's vote was not counted; South Dakota law allows for the fairly quick and efficient removal of such ballots. States vary on how they handle this situation.

With all respect to Obama and his grandmother, who sounds like a remarkable woman, it just doesn't seem fair that a dead voter's ballot should count thus neutralizing a living voter's ballot.

As such a huge influence in Obama's life, she already did her part. And she evidently did it wonderfully.