By Mike Norman
mnorman@star-telegram.com
Don't be surprised if you're one of the thousands of Texans -- about 1,800 in Tarrant County -- getting an official letter conspicuously marked "VERIFICATION OF VOTER STATUS."
On second thought, do be surprised. If the letter is addressed to you and is about nobody else but you, it will be hard not to be surprised. In terms chosen to be as delicate as possible, the letter asks whether your status might include being dead.
Don't toss it out as junk mail. It's legit.
What you're supposed to do, within 30 days, is contact county elections officials and tell them you are not dead. Unless, of course, you are, which is another thing entirely.
You might want to check with your spouse or a friend to make sure, look into a mirror to see whether you look alive, try walking through a wall like a ghost, maybe even call your doctor's office and ask whether anything about being dead showed up in your most recent lab test results (although you'd think they would have notified you about that).
If you are regular reader of the obituary notices in this newspaper, you may have seen a notice of your demise. If that's the case and you are dead, there is no need for you to respond. Somebody else might respond on your behalf, just to keep the record straight.
What, you might ask, gives county officials reason to believe you might have gone to the great beyond?
That's the point where you have to set the joking aside. This is serious business.
It's all about keeping the voter registration rolls clean and honest. Efforts to keep them correct are constant.
We don't want the names of deceased people to remain on the voter rolls. Even more important, we don't want people showing up at the polls, claiming their identity and voting for them.
This is the first time voter registrars in their quest to clean up the rolls have used a huge master list of "potentially deceased" persons maintained by the Social Security Administration. The Legislature passed a bill last year mandating use of the Social Security list.
The list has 85 million names, says Rich Parsons, director of communications for the Texas Secretary of State's office.
More than 13 million people are registered to vote in Texas, and 76,990 of them were found to be on the "potentially deceased" list. The total includes strong matches (meaning the registered voter's name, Social Security number and date of birth were exactly the same as a potentially deceased person) and weak matches (in which some but not all of the elements paired up, maybe a few digits of the Social Security numbers were off).
All of the names were sent to voter registrars across the state. Tarrant County Elections Administrator Steve Raborn says about 4,000 of them came to his office.
Raborn says people in his office searched the list, eliminated many of the weak matches, removed clearly identifiable strong matches from the voter registration rolls and last week mailed letters to about 1,800 people whose life-or-death status was uncertain.
By law, those who don't respond within 30 days will be removed from the voter rolls, although if they show up to vote in the Nov. 6 election they'll still be allowed to cast a ballot and their votes will be counted.
Responses to the letters so far are split about 50-50 between dead and not dead, Raborn says.
So far, nobody has said they're undecided.
Mike Norman is editorial director of the Star-Telegram / Arlington and Northeast Tarrant County.817-390-7830Twitter: @mnorman9
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