I voted in the 2021 election for the current German government. Later, I moved to Berlin, where they had to repeat the election this spring due to some screw-ups back then (turns out running a marathon on election day is not a good idea). So I was asked to vote again and I did. I checked with the authorities and everything is fine.

I suppose there's some noise in any voting system, and it's fine if the magnitude is small and its distribution random. Looking at the US, I'd be more worried about gerrymandering than a few votes from the dead.

What happens if someone votes in person and dies before polls close later that day? The number of people this is relevant to as a percentage of votes is miniscule.

What if someone votes, but the caesium atom decays and triggers the poison vial to crack and fill the voting booth?

I think Missouri's policy is the most correct.

> Missouri prohibits such ballots from being counted if it is proven that the voter died before polls opened and the ballot envelope has not yet been opened.

It seems reasonable to me that to be an eligible voter in an election, you must be alive. A ballot filled out in advance is merely a piece of paper until it is officially cast by an eligible voter on election day. If a voter dies before the polls open and there is a system in place to detect this, their vote should not be counted because they are no longer eligible. Conversely, if the voter is alive even one second after the polls open, their vote should be counted.

The real question.. what if someone dies just before the person who they voted for is announced a winner :(

That's interesting - to me, it seems to work like cash basis vs accrual basis accounting depending on the state.

What if you cast an early vote, but declared dead on Election Day after life saving measure fail (23:55 local time). However suddenly wake up the following day (Lazarus Syndrome) at 06:00 local time?

What happens if someone votes and dies before the vote is tallied?

If a runaway trolley is on course to hit five mail-in voters before election day, and you have the opportunity to pull a lever and divert the trolley to a track with one registered voter who will later be voting at the polls...

Nice try, HN, but I can recognize yet another attempt to stir the pot on the at-least-once message delivery guarantee debate.

Funny, I too searched this question earlier today. Presumably OP also was wondering what happens if Jimmy Carter dies before Election Day.

There are a lot of comments on this post treating it like a question to them (that they are annoyed with!) rather than a link to an article explaining what happens.

There's also an eventual-consistency effect at play.

If the County Elections Office doesn't learn someone died before their ballot is decanted into the general collection for counting, that's it. No way at that point to pull the ballot back out because the source of the vote is anonymous.

Look, it's a jurisdiction's problem that begins when they decide to open the voting window to weeks rather than a single day.

If someplace permits early voting, then I don't see a moral or ethical justification for nullifying a vote cast by someone who's already legally cast those votes and submitted that ballot, which is now out of their hands and in custody of the State.

If they want to disenfranchise dead people, then discontinue mail-ins and early voting, and compel everyone to show up in person again.

(I detested in-person election days, because I do all my research ahead of time with actual ballot in hand, and I'd never make good decisions in a claustrophobic little box, standing up, with dozens in line waiting for me.)

as always, it depends on which state you’re in.

federalism, as a crude form of polyculture, is probably more boon than bane.

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The same thing as if someone votes and then gets ran over by a car as they walk out of the polling station. If the vote was legally emitted, it's counted.

There should be an HN filter that rewrites "what happens if?" to "what happens when." titles to preempt all the low effort answers.