An 81-year-old Illinois man was shocked to receive a mail-in ballot for his wife, who died in October 2022.
George, who lives in Kane County about 50 miles west of Chicago, showed The Daily Wire the ballot which he found in his mailbox on Saturday. He also received a ballot addressed to his late wife ahead of the Illinois primary in March. This was especially confusing, George said, because he had shown his wife’s death certificate to Kane County election officials — who also told The Daily Wire that George’s wife was no longer on the voter rolls.
The saga has George concerned about the integrity of the presidential election — and he’s not alone. Voters in several swing states have reached out to The Daily Wire to share stories like George’s, and raise concerns about what’s going on with mail-in ballots.
“There are states that do better than others in terms of identifying and removing all forms of inaccurate voter registration,” says Honest Elections Project executive director Jason Snead, adding that there are “widespread” issues with voter rolls throughout the country.
Photo of ballot sent from George to Daily Wire.
George, who has lived in Illinois for over six decades, said his ballot issues began with the 2022 midterms, when he got to his polling place on Election Day, only to be told he couldn’t vote in person because he had a pending mail-in ballot.
In the end, George said he had to go home and pick up his mail ballot, which he hadn’t used, and take it in to get it voided. He also brought the ballot that had been sent to his late wife, which he said really “upset” the election officials. He said he was eventually able to vote, but only after about 45 minutes of discussions with election officials and showing his wife’s death certificate to have her ballot voided.
While Illinois law allows voters to request permanent mail-in vote status for primary and general elections, George told The Daily Wire that he never signed up to get a mail-in ballot, and always votes in person.
“My assumption is that they are just sending everyone they can think of a ballot,” George said.
Kane County Clerk John Cunningham told The Daily Wire that George’s wife was no longer on the rolls, and that the county’s signature verification process would have caught any attempted voter fraud.
“Even if someone got a ballot and they mailed it in, and filled it out, it would not be counted because the signature would not be right,” he said. “Because we check for signature on our voter database with the signature on the ballot and if they don’t match, then we don’t count them.”
He said that he did not know how she could have ended up with a ballot for the primary election.
“She’s not on our records, so I don’t know how she would have gotten that,” he said, but said he couldn’t tell when she was removed from the record.
Several current and former Arizona voters told The Daily Wire they have received ballots for people who had moved out of the state.
Skyler, a former Army medic, told The Daily Wire that he and his wife have received 2024 mail-in ballots from Arizona at their home in Colorado, where he is now registered to vote. Previously a resident of Maricopa County, Skyler said that he voted absentee throughout his military career before retiring in May 2024, when he registered to vote in Colorado.
Despite changing his voter registration and informing Maricopa County that he was no longer an Arizona voter, Skyler said that received mail-in ballots for both the July primary election and the November general election. He doesn’t know how Maricopa County got his Colorado address.
Another Maricopa County resident told The Daily Wire they had been receiving a ballot for their daughter for the past three years, even though she had moved to Utah. They said they returned the ballots every year, indicating that their daughter no longer lived there, but that they still had been receiving her ballot.
One Maricopa County woman told The Daily Wire that she had received a ballot to her home for her son for years, as recently as the 2024 primary elections, even though he had lived in Alabama for six years.
According to Arizona law, voters on the Active Early Voting List (AEVL) are automatically sent a ballot “for all elections in which they are eligible to vote.” However, voters are supposed to be taken off the list if they do not vote in two consecutive federal elections.
“A voter may be removed from AEVL if the voter does not cast an early ballot in at least one candidate election over the course of two consecutive federal election cycles and fails to respond to an official notice from the Elections Department,” Maricopa County’s election website says.
“If you don’t vote the ballot, why do they keep sending you one?” the concerned Arizonan asked, noting that her son has not voted in the 2018, 2020, or 2022 federal elections, but received a ballot for the 2024 primaries.
She said that she also had received a ballot for a prior resident of a home she and her husband had purchased in Tucson. She said this raised concerns about how many ballots may be floating out there for people who have not moved out of Arizona, or even to a different home.
When asked about concerns with mail-in ballots, the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office said voters could “fill out a voter cancellation form” online and pointed to the county’s “voter list maintenance practices” posted online.
“Under Recorder [Stephen] Richer, more than 400,000 voters have been removed from our voter rolls due to diligent list maintenance. Our office reviews multiple databases to ensure our voter rolls remain as accurate as possible,” the recorder’s office told The Daily Wire in a statement.
Voting by mail in Arizona begins on October 9. The deadline to request a ballot by mail is October 25.
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With just 34 days until the election, issues with mail-in ballots have begun to make headlines. Last week, election officials in Madison, Wisconsin, sent out 2,215 duplicate ballots to the heavily-Democratic city.
“This was a mistake,” said city spokesman Dylan Brogan. “The clerk’s office moved to rectify it as quickly as possible.”
In response, Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-WI) has called for an independent investigation into the incident, saying that voters “deserve clear answers regarding the full scope of this blunder.”
In Pennsylvania, another battleground state, the Republican National Committee filed a lawsuit last month alleging that Montgomery County officials had sent out 2024 election ballots without conducting accuracy testing required by state laws. The suit said that the county, the commonwealth’s third most populous, did not conduct logic and accuracy tests before sending out absentee ballots.
Former President Donald Trump has long raised concerns about mail-in voting, arguing that it opens up the door to fraud. And while Trump has encouraged supporters to vote however they can in the coming cycle, he has said he would restrict mail-in voting if he wins the White House.
“Any time you have a mail-in ballot, there’s going to be massive fraud. What we have to do is, get control, and then we have to change it,” he said during an interview in August. “And it’s a very simple change, same day voting.”
Editor’s note: If you had an issue with mail-in ballots, we’d love to hear from you in our tip line. You can submit a tip here.