South Carolina’s Voting Walking Dead Story Proven Fluke

South Carolina lawmakers claimed zombies have been voting. An investigation by the state's law enforcement division proved this wrong.

By Brentin Mock Jul 12, 2013

According to some state lawmakers, there is an alternate universe where zombies run amok, looking not to physically attack us but vote us out of existence through fraudulent ballot casting.

To fight off the World War Z scourge, they say, we don’t need Brad Pitt but photo voter ID cards. South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles director Kevin Shwedo said as much last year during hearings where he pushed for voter ID, claiming he had a list of over 900 voters who cast ballots from the grave.  

As reported by Corey Hutchins in the Columbia Free Times, state Rep. Alan Clemmons, a Horry County Republican, ran with Shwedo’s unsubstantiated claim, telling the public, "We must have certainty in South Carolina that zombies aren’t voting."

South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, also a Republican, made the same claim and used it to crusade against President Obama’s Department of Justice (DOJ). Along with his friends at True the Vote, Wilson spun a narrative about how the federal government was preventing him from defending his state against the zombie voter fraud attacks.

But it turns out that, like most zombie stories, this was pure comic book plot. The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division conducted an 18-month investigation into whether dead people voted — and found not one legitimate case of any such thing happening.

The Division’s report was released quietly just before the Fourth of July holiday, following an information request by Hutchins, who noted in his article that the agency made no comment about their findings.

And it’s not just South Carolina. This same voter fraud mythology has been peddled in Pennsylvania by lawmakers as they made a case for a voter ID law — only to walk it backwhen it was time to go on the record during a legal challenge to the law.

Similar voter fraud claims have also been made — and debunked — in TexasWisconsinMississippi, and Minnesota. And who can forget voter fraud hustler James O’Keefe’s attempt to stage a zombie voter fraud outbreak in North Carolina?

In all of these situations, Republican lawmakers and conservative activists drummed up tales of voter fraud, made outrageous claims in public, but failed to apologize when the data contradicted them. Meanwhile, photo voter ID laws are still being passed based on bad information.

This was cross-posted from the Institute for Southern Studies blog "Facing South," where I’m guest-blogging for July. Read the rest of the post here