The Voting Dead

 

Jonathan Adler over at Volokh links to the Ohio report about how many of the dead are still on the voting rolls there. From the comments:

Bob Lipton says:
As a native son of New York City, I find this distrust of the dead to be bigoted and unwarranted. The dead have formed an important voting bloc in New York City and other urban centers for decades. To deprive someone of the the franchise just because he happens to reside in a graveyard instead of an apartment building smacks of an attempted to deprive the majority of control of the government in favor of a small minority, which is clearly undemocratic. It merely favors those who show up at other events.

The dead make little demand on the state. Through specially and perhaps unconstitutionally onerous ‘death taxes’ and ‘estate taxes’ they bear a disproportionate proportion of the burden on the common wealth. They use no public hospitals, draw no pensions, commit no known crimes and have tiny carbon footprints.

Yet despite these marks of good citizenship and, perhaps, oppression, there is a movement about to deprive them of the franchise, spearheaded, no doubt, by the minority of Americans who see them as impediments to their own private goals and who like to show up at camera-covered events to protest the more quiescent fellow Americans.

Perhaps the Necro-American communities scattered throughout this fair land of ours are insufficiently politically active for their own good, but they are, on average, older than the living, less physically able and they doubtless consider it less dignified to be out and about, engaging in unbecoming picketing and shout, preferring to let their voting make their political choices clear for them.

Whatever their privately held reasons are — and who can blame them for not making those reasons public in this modern climate of yellow journalism — we should, as good Americans, support their wishes to remain private individuals without giving up those rights, privileges and duties that we all hold dear, among them the franchise. After all, it is all too likely that many of the people reading this will some day join a Necro-American community, and who among us would wish to lose our vote?

I am told that they should be referred to as "Vitally Challenged" or "Otherly Animate" these days. 

And in seriousness, GKC thought that tradition is the way we give our ancestors a vote.