[EL] government lists, list cleaning, social security data, and death

[Lorraine Minnite]

The counter-point is more important with respect to voting.  In recent
testimony before the House Committee on Ways and Means Subcommittee on
Social Security, the Inspector General of the Social Security
Administration reported that “we in the OIG…remain concerned with the
overall accuracy of the SSA’s death data,” stating that “…there are about
1,000 cases each month in which a living individual is mistakenly included
in the DMF.”   A 2008 audit found that between January 2004 and April 2007,
there were 20,623 individuals erroneously listed as dead on the SSA Death
Index.  There is almost no evidence of voter impersonation in which there
is a deliberate effort to fraudulently vote in the the name of a deceased
person still on the voter rolls (the few cases of elderly voters sending in
the absentee ballots of their recently departed spouses, notwithstanding).
 We want clean registration lists, but from the standpoint of voting
rights, the latter problem with the SSA death index is more troubling
because it could result in legitimate voters being erroneously purged.

Lori Minnite

On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 9:45 AM, Doug Hess <douglasrhess at gmail.com> wrote:

> Just more evidence of complications that show how fragile list
> matching is and why it takes time to clean and how careful one has to
> be...one wonders what the counter-point of this problem is: by that I
> mean, people declared dead that are not (i.e., people with matching
> names, DOBs, etc.).
>
> "Social Security Administration did not properly record 1.2 million
> deaths, auditors find" Washington Post, July 12, 2012,
>
>
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/post/social-security-administration-did-not-properly-record-12-million-deaths-auditors-find/2012/07/11/gJQAF4SydW_blog.html?wpisrc=nl_fedinsider
>
> "A new report says the Social Security Administration failed to
> properly record the deaths of 1.2 million Americans on a list that is
> distributed to federal agencies and private companies, making it
> likely that their families or others wrongly received benefits after
> they died. ..."
>
> -Doug
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