Betty Ellis doesn’t know why 100 dead people were registered to vote in Wright County.
That’s a problem. Ellis is the county auditor and in charge of elections there.
Wright County’s number of registered dead came to light last week when Secretary of State Matt Schultz announced that 1,234 Iowans who are listed as dead by the Social Security Administration are still registered to vote.
“We reviewed the information from the Social Security death index and then sent names that appeared on both the index and the voter rolls to the auditor of the county the person is registered in so the auditor can determine if the information is accurate and the person’s name needs to be removed,” Schultz’s spokesperson, Chance McElhaney, told Iowa Watchdog.
Only Wayne County didn’t have any dead people registered. Most of Iowa’s other 98 counties had numbers in the single digits or low teens.