Are Dead People Voting By Mail?
Evidence From Washington State Administrative
Records∗
Jennifer Wu†, Chenoa Yorgason†, Hanna Folsz†,
Cassandra Handan-Nader‡, Andrew Myers§, Tobias Nowacki‡,Daniel M. Thompson¶, Jesse Yoder‡, and Andrew B. Hallk
Democracy & Polarization Lab, Stanford University
October 27, 2020

Abstract
A commonly expressed concern about vote-by-mail in the United States is that mail-in
ballots are sent to dead people, stolen by bad actors, and counted as fraudulent votes.
To evaluate how often this occurs in practice, we study the state of Washington, which
sends every registered voter a mail-in ballot. We link counted ballots and administrative death records to estimate the rate at which dead people’s mail-in ballots are
improperly counted as valid votes, using birth dates from online obituaries to address
false positives. Among roughly 4.5 million distinct voters in Washington state between
2011 and 2018, we estimate that there are 14 deceased individuals whose ballots might
have been cast suspiciously long after their death, representing 0.0003% of voters. Eventhese few cases may reflect two individuals with the same name and birth date, or clerical errors, rather than fraud. After exploring the robustness of our findings to weakerconditions for matching names, we conclude that it seems extraordinarily rare for deadpeople’s ballots to be counted as votes in Washington’s universal vote-by-mail system.

∗

For helpful information, the authors particularly thank Stuart Holmes and the Washington Secretary ofState’s Office. For advice, the authors thank Charles Stewart. For research assistance, the authors thankSarah Raza.
†
Ph.D. Student, Department of Political Science‡
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science§
Predoctoral Research Fellow, SIEPR¶
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, UCLAk
Professor, Department of Political Science and Graduate School of Business (by courtesy); Senior Fellow,
SIEPR

1

Introduction

One of the most common concerns raised about vote-by-mail in the United States, which has
become highly salient during the COVID-19 pandemic, is that ballots sent to dead people
could be mailed back and counted as valid votes. In discussing the security of mail-in voting,the Heritage Foundation writes that “Voter registration rolls are notoriously inaccurate andout of date, containing the names of voters who are deceased, have moved, or otherwise havebecome ineligible...[which] risks those ballots being stolen and voted.”1 In August of 2020,
Donald Trump Jr. claimed on Twitter, citing a Breitbart article, that 8% of all votes in
the Michigan primary were cast using dead people’s mail-in ballots.2 Claims like these areimportant to assess because they call into question the legitimacy of the American electoral
system. They are also particularly salient as a number of states have switched to universal
vote-by-mail, a program in which every registered voter is mailed their ballot, during the
pandemic. Pointing to potential fraud, President Trump has declared universal vote-by-mailto be “catastrophic.”3 Attitudes towards the expansion of vote-by-mail are mixed and havepolarized along partisan lines (Lockhart et al. 2020), and voter confidence in vote-by-mailis generally lower than in-person voting (Bryant 2020), which makes evaluating its security
especially relevant.4 And because who votes and who dies are both matters of public recordin America, we can directly evaluate the claim that dead people’s mail-in ballots are regularly
voted fraudulently in elections with data.
To do so, we link administrative data on deaths and voter turnout in the state of Washington, one of the most prominent states to administer elections entirely by mail. With thisdata, we find cases in which a person who died before he or she could legally vote in theupcoming election shares the same name, county of residence, gender, and age with someone1

https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/commentary/potential-fraud-why-mailelections-should-be-dead-letter2
https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1294734395736236034?s=20
3
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53795876
4
On the effects of universal vote-by-mail, see for example Gerber, Huber, and Hill (2013) and Thompson
et al. (2020).

1

who cast a vote in that election or any subsequent one. Many of these potential cases reflect different individuals who share these attributes, so we collect dates of birth from online
sources to remove a large number of false positives.
Among roughly 4.5 million distinct voters in Washington state between 2011 and 2018,
when we focus on cases where records match on full name including middle name, we estimatethat there are 14 deceased individuals whose ballots were cast suspiciously long after their
deaths, representing 0.0003% of voters. Even these few cases may reflect two individuals withthe same name and birth date, or clerical errors, rather than fraud. If we relax requirements
for matching middle names to accommodate people who may not have middle names, weestimate that there are an additional 43 cases of potential fraud, but these are more likely
to be false positives. On the whole, the results suggest that it is extremely rare for deadpeople’s ballots to be counted as votes in Washington’s universal vote-by-mail system.
Our work adds to the large literature on voter fraud in American elections by quantifying the amount of voter fraud related to dead people’s ballots specifically in the context ofuniversal vote-by-mail, where concerns about this fraud have become most salient. In studying this form of voter fraud, we build directly on Hood III and Gillespie (2012), a study
which combines automated and manual matching methods to quantify the rate of deceased
voters’ ballots being improperly counted in the 2006 general election in Georgia (not a universal vote-by-mail state), finding essentially zero cases of this form of fraud.5 By directly
linking administrative data to detect fraud, our study is also related to Goel et al. (2020),
which performs a similar analysis to quantify rates of double voting, again finding minusculerates. Beyond these studies, a much broader literature relies on other forms of data, like
reported instances of fraud (e.g. Minnite 2010; Alvarez, Hall, and Hyde 2009; Levitt 2007) or
suspicious statistical patterns in aggregate data (e.g Cottrell, Herron, and Westwood 2018;5

Our focus on a longer time period and on assessing a fast-moving debate relevant to the 2020 election
comes at the cost of some depth; while Hood III and Gillespie (2012) presents a remarkably deep audit of
suspicious cases, making public records requests and ruling out nearly all specific suspicious cases as false
positives, we only rule out false positives based on publicly available online data. It is reassuring, then,that our broader analysis of universal vote-by-mail in Washington arrives at a similar conclusion to their
deeper analysis for Georgia.

2

Alvarez, Hall, and Hyde 2009; Mebane 2008), again concluding that various detectible formsof voter fraud seem very rare.6
The present study is confined to evaluating the rate at which deceased voters’ ballots aremailed in and counted as official votes in the state of Washington. There are two important
limitations to this focus.
First, we do not measure other types of fraud. Because dead people voting is one of
the most important potential types of fraud, one of the most salient in the 2020 election,and is understudied in the existing literature, this is a valuable focus. However, we should
be clear that our results cannot speak to forms of potential fraud like the ballot-tampering
controversy that occurred in North Carolina in 2018.7
Second, while our analyses suggest that this form of fraud is incredibly rare in Washington, our results do not directly speak to rates of fraud in other states. Washington has spentyears developing and honing its process for vote-by-mail. States that attempt to extend
voting by mail without time to develop the same rigorous processes as Washington could
see higher rates of fraud, including higher rates of dead people’s ballots being counted. Still,
fraud of this form is unlikely to be widespread in any context due to the precautions states
take, which we discuss in the context of Washington below.
The purpose of this paper is not to endorse or reject universal vote-by-mail as a policy.
There are many considerations in supporting or expanding the use of universal vote-by-mailthat go beyond the particular kind of fraud we evaluate. As people continue to debate
how America should administer its elections, the particular claim that dead people’s mail-in
ballots are fraudulently cast and counted as votes at high rates is likely to persist. The
purpose of this paper is to evaluate this specific claim with data.
6

There is also a recent Washington Post/ ERIC (Electronic Registration Information Center) analysis which relies on reported instances of fraud. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/
minuscule-number-of-potentially-fraudulent-ballots-in-states-with-universal-mailvoting-undercuts-trump-claims-about-election-risks/2020/06/08/1e78aa26-a5c5-11ea-bb20ebf0921f3bbd_story.html.
7
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30/746800630/north-carolina-gop-operative-faces-new-felonycharges-that-allege-ballot-fraud3

2

Why We Study Washington State

We focus on Washington state because it employs universal vote-by-mail. Every registeredvoter is mailed a ballot which can be mailed back with pre-paid postage, dropped off at oneof many drop box locations, or returned in person to County Elections Offices. Since thisis the specific policy that President Trump and others have suggested leads to widespreadfraud related to deceased voters’ ballots, it makes sense to focus on a state that employs thispolicy.
While a number of other states also employ universal vote-by-mail, Washington is ideal forour purposes because of the data it offers. Unlike many other states, Washington has madestatewide voter file snapshots (voter rolls which include information about every registeredvoter at a particular point in time, such as unique Voter ID, name, county, and date ofbirth), as well as statewide voter histories (lists of Voter IDs who have cast a verified (nonrejected) vote, including local elections) since 2011, publicly available to researchers. The
Secretary of State maintains nearly monthly voter file snapshots, which enables us to havea nearly-perfect portrait of who has voted in each election within our period of study.

3

Ballot Security in Washington

To ensure election security, Washington takes a number of steps. Together, these steps likely
make it difficult to fraudulently cast a dead person’s ballot.
First, ballots are assigned unique barcodes which allows voters to track their ballots
online. This also allows the state to confirm that the returned ballot corresponds to a
specific entry in the voter registration database, and is intended as one of a number ofcountermeasures to prevent people mailing in fake ballots, as they cannot duplicate theseunique barcodes. As a result, the first step a fraudulent actor would have to take to votein the name of a dead person is to obtain their actual ballot. Doing this at any meaningful
scale would require knowing when specific ballots have been mailed and where they have4

been mailed to. Concerns around this type of fraud often focus on cases in which ballots
are mailed to the wrong place, or are left somewhere where anyone might pick them up.
Someone intending to commit fraud might be able to wait for random opportunities likethese as another means for obtaining ballots, but they are unlikely to know in advance whenor where such an opportunity might occur.
Like other states, after receiving a returned mail-in ballot, Washington compares thesignature on the ballot envelope to the voter’s signature in a government database in orderto validate the identity of the voter. To successfully cast a dead person’s ballot, a fraudulent
actor would therefore need to forge the signature well enough to circumvent this process.
While there is no doubt that signature verification is an imperfect filter, it is a real barrier,and ballots are regularly thrown out due to signature issues.8
Finally, the Elections division of the Secretary of State frequently purges newly-noneligible voters such as felons, the dead, and individuals who have moved outside of the state.
In the case of the recent registrants who have died, the Elections division uses Department
of Health death records to match on name, date of birth, and the last four digits of one’s
Social Security number, which ensures a high confidence match that the purged voter isindeed recently deceased.9 Furthermore, the state participates in the Electronic Registration
Information Center, a consortium of 30 states that share voter file information in order toeliminate extraneous voter records by identifying cross-state movers, in-state voter updates
and duplicates, and the deceased.
Therefore, after obtaining a dead person’s ballot and forging their signature successfully,
a fraudulent actor would then need to hope that the state has accidentally missed the deathrecord of the individual associated with the ballot—otherwise, when the ballot is received, it
will be flagged as belonging to a deceased individual and will not be counted.10 In addition,
8

See for example https://www-cdn.law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/SLS_Signature_
Verification_Report-5-15-20-FINAL.pdf.
9Some older voter records lack the last four SSN digits; for these, the Elections division examines possible
matches based off of the decedent’s name and date of birth.
10
In Washington, a ballot cast by an individual who subsequently dies in the period between voting andelection day is considered a valid vote.

5

an audit process will begin, and if it is determined that the ballot was cast fraudulently,
a criminal investigation could follow. If a person is found guilty of fraudulently casting aballot in this manner, it is a class C felony in the state of Washington punishable by up to
5 years in prison.
Given these countermeasures, it would seem difficult to carry off this type of fraud atthe scale required to alter election outcomes meaningfully. Finding a large enough numberof ballots, forging the signatures, and evading the validation countermeasures seem likedaunting challenges to a would-be fraudster. Given the large felony penalty if a person iscaught, and the dim prospects for changing an election outcome in this way, it is perhaps
not surprising that existing research concludes this kind of fraud is rare.

4

Using Death Records and the Voter File

To assess the rate at which dead people’s ballots are counted in Washington elections, wegathered official death records from 1990 onwards from the Department of Health Death
Index in the Washington State Digital Archives. For each death record, we have a uniquereference number, first name, middle initial, last name, date of death, county of residence,
and age at death.
We then use the complete voter file and vote history files from the Washington Secretaryof State. The voter files contain records of people who voted from 2011 to 2018, withinformation including a unique state voter ID, first name, middle name, last name, and dateof birth. The vote history files contain the state voter ID, county, and election for eachcounted ballot.
We focus on data from 2011 through 2018. Although we do have access to data from2006 up through 2011 as well, we do not use this data for two related reasons. First, thestate of Washington did not have statewide universal vote-by-mail until 2011. Second, in
communications with the Washington Secretary of State’s office, we were made aware of6

potential issues in the data for the period prior to full adoption of universal vote-by-mail.
Consistent with the idea that the high-quality data starts in 2011, we found that the numeric
ID in the voter file meant to uniquely link voters to their voter histories—critical for ouranalysis—are not fully unique until 2011. We are therefore unable to distinguish genuine
potential fraud cases from database error in this earlier period. As such, we have removed
this period from the analysis, and we report counts of potential fraud and their rate among
all voters using only 2011-2018 data.
We use all federal races in our analysis, comprising all statewide primary and generalelections during the time period we study.

5

Main Evidence: Minimal Fraud in Washington

We begin by presenting our most credible evidence on the rate of fraud related to deceased
voters’ ballots in Washington state.
We start by defining a “name match” as any death record that links to a counted ballot
in the voter file under the following conditions:
1. Reflects a death that occurred more than 90 days prior to the election;
2. The death record and the voter record match exactly on first name, middle name, andlast name;
3. The death record and the voter record match exactly on age (in years);
4. The death record and the voter record match exactly on county of residence;
5. The death record and the voter record match exactly on gender.
We restrict to deaths occurring more than 90 days prior to a given counted vote because,in the state of Washington, a ballot mailed in by a living voter who then dies prior to theelection is a valid vote. Because voters can receive their mail-in ballots up to 90 days before
the election,11 any link we find between a deceased voter and a counted vote within 90 daysof the election is likely to be legitimate.
11

Confirmed in personal correspondence with the Washington Secretary of State’s office.

7

Table 1 – Finding Potential Cases of Voter Fraud Related to theCasting of Dead People’s Mail-in Ballots, Washington State, 2011–2018

All Voters# CasesRate

4,550,505

Name Matches−→–

Variables
Used To
Link

907

Plausible Cases−→

0.000199
Last NameFirst Name
Middle Init
CountyAge
Gender14[11, 210]0.000003

DOB

Unit of observation is a distinct voter. Manski bounds in square brackets.

After matching on full name, age, county, and gender, as Table 1 shows, we are left with
907 total name matches, out of roughly 4.5 million voters. Most of these are not fraud.
Within a large county, a non-trivial number of people share the same name, age, and gender.
As such, the vast majority of these possible cases actually reflect two different people, one ofwhom died, the other of whom cast a perfectly valid ballot. The state of Washington is able
to rule out many of these cases because they have access to additional data, like dates ofbirth and the last four digits of Social Security numbers, that are not present in the public
version of the death records.
To overcome this issue, we next collect data on dates of birth for these possible links, using
online records. We conducted a manual search using FindAGrave.com, FamilySearch.org,
and other online sources to look for obituaries that provide a date of birth for the deceased.
When we find that a voter with a counted vote in the voter file shares the same date ofbirth as the one we find through this search process, we count that as a positive match. If
we find that the two individuals have different dates of birth, we count that as a confirmed
negative match. When we cannot find a date of birth for the death record, we leave this as
unconfirmed.

8After this process, we find 11 confirmed matches of potential fraud. We rule out 697 of thecases. This leaves us with 199 cases we cannot rule out. To produce a single estimate of thenumber of potentially fraudulent cases for this group, we use the rate of confirmed matchesfrom the cases we are able to rule on decisively. This rate is 0.016, i.e., 11 confirmed matches
divided by the 11 confirmed matches plus the 697 confirmed non-matches. Multiplying thisrate by 199 gives us an estimated 3 additional plausible cases for the unconfirmed set, leading
us to estimate a total of 14 plausible cases. This constitutes a rate of this form of fraud ofroughly 0.0003%.
These estimated 14 cases, including the 11 confirmed matches, are still not necessarily
cases of fraud—they may indicate clerical errors, or cases in which two individuals shared
the same name and birth date—but they are the most plausible cases that exist in the data.
Obviously, they constitute a tiny fraction of all voters in our sample, far too small to affectany major election outcome.
Next, we perform a Manski bounding exercise using the uncertain cases, by imaginingthat they are all false positives or false negatives. These bounds are given in square brackets
in the table. If we assume that all of the unconfirmed cases are actual matches, we arrive at
210 matches from 2011 through 2018. This is clearly a large overestimate of the total numberof matches, but it is still a very small rate of possible fraud, a rate of roughly 0.0005%.

5.1

Summary

In the most straightforward approach, we find that there are extremely few cases of deadpeople’s ballots being counted as votes in Washington state elections.

6

Looking for Additional Cases of Fraud

Our baseline estimates reveal extraordinarily low rates of potential fraud related to deceased
individuals’ ballots in the state of Washington. However, we could be missing additional

9

cases of potential fraud if the record linking procedure we used above is overly conservative.
For instance, there could be cases in which someone’s full name differs in the two databases
due to differences in middle names, such as if one record includes only a middle initial, or if
one record has no middle name while the other does. Misspellings or alternative spellings ofthe first name are another potential source of false negatives.
To see if there are additional cases of fraud we might be missing, we conduct an automatedevaluation of a much larger pool of possible cases. Our expanded pool of possible cases
includes all instances where the age, county, gender, and first and last name of a voter
match a death record but the middle initials in both records do not match or are missing.
We also loosen the match on first name to permit differences in spelling by defining a matchfor the first name as any case in which the Jaro-Winkler string distance between the firstname in the two records is below 0.1. By loosening the match conditions in these ways, we
significantly increase the likelihood of false positives, but it allows us to assess whether there
many additional potential cases we’ve missed.
We conduct this automated evaluation by scraping FindAGrave.com and FamilySearch.org,
the two sources we most often used to confirm or disconfirm a case manually.
Casting this wider net, we find a total of 25 cases where we verify matching birth dates,from among 11,165 possible cases based on our fuzzy name match along with exact matcheson county, age, and gender. Because these rely on weaker name-matching conditions, thelikelihood of these being cases of two different people with similar names and the same birthdate is higher than in our previous analysis. But the fact that we find only 25 potential caseseven with this potentially high rate of false positives is informative.
Of the 11,165 name matches under this procedure, we are unable to find date of birthinformation for 6,418 cases. Using the same technique as before to impute a rate of true
matches for this group, we arrive at an estimate of 59 total plausible matches.12 We suspect
12Since our automated procedure for validating links leaves many more cases unconfirmed, we evaluate thesensitivity of our estimate of plausible matches to alternative imputation strategies in the appendix. Ourestimates of the rate of plausible cases is similar after adjusting for a large number of potential observabledifferences between confirmed and unconfirmed potential cases.

10many of these may be false positives, but even if these were all fraudulent cases, it is a verysmall number of voters among 4.5 million individuals we study.

7

Conclusion

It is vital that citizens in a democracy believe their elections are run freely and fairly, andthat the winner of the election has won legitimately. This is why concerns about voter fraud
are so important; if fraud is widespread, the winner of the election did not necessarily win
fairly, and the government could lose its legitimacy.
The COVID-19 pandemic has strained our election system, and in so doing, it has elevatedconcerns about the logistics of our elections. With the massive increase in voting by mail,and with a number of states implementing universal vote-by-mail, the claim that fraudulent
actors steal dead people’s ballots and vote with them has become salient. This particular
claim is especially interesting because it is directly testable, because who votes and who dies
are both matters of public record in America.
Using these public records, we have found that dead people’s ballots are almost nevervoted fraudulently and subsequently counted as valid votes in the state of Washington.
There are many other important questions about how states administer their elections
by mail. The most important issues likely relate to voters not receiving their ballots or
having their ballots rejected. Nevertheless, issues of security and fraud are important totake seriously and to evaluate. Our analysis is not the final word on the broad questionof the integrity of vote-by-mail, but in discussing these issues, our results are relevant for
claims about the security of vote-by-mail with respect to dead people’s ballots. The deadare, generally speaking, not voting by mail in Washington. These results are likely to extend
to other contexts where states take similar precautions to those taken in Washington.

11

References
Alvarez, R Michael, Thad E Hall, and Susan D Hyde. 2009. Election Fraud: Detecting andDeterring Electoral Manipulation. Brookings Institution Press.
Bryant, Lisa A. 2020. “Seeing Is Believing: An Experiment on Absentee Ballots and Voter
Confidence: Part of Special Symposium on Election Sciences.” American Politics Research48(6).
Cottrell, David, Michael C Herron, and Sean J Westwood. 2018. “An Exploration of Donald Trump’s Allegations of Massive Voter Fraud in the 2016 General Election.” Electoral
Studies 51: 123–142.
Gerber, Alan S., Gregory A. Huber, and Seth A. Hill. 2013. “Identifying the Effect of AllMail Elections on Turnout: Staggered Reform in the Evergreen State.” Political Science
Research and Methods 1(1): 91–116.
Goel, Sharad, Marc Meredith, Michael Morse, David Rothschild, and Houshmand ShiraniMehr. 2020. “One Person, One Vote: Estimating the Prevalence of Double Voting in US
Presidential Elections.” American Political Science Review 114(2): 456–469.
Hood III, MV, and William Gillespie. 2012. “They Just Do Not Vote Like They Used To:
A Methodology to Empirically Assess Election Fraud.” Social Science Quarterly 93(1):
76–94.
Levitt, Justin. 2007.
“The Truth About Voter Fraud.” Working Paper. https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/The%20Truth%20About%
20Voter%20Fraud.pdf.
Lockhart, Mackenzie, Seth J Hill, Jennifer Merolla, Mindy Romero, and Thad Kousser.
2020. “America’s electorate is increasingly polarized along partisan lines about voting by
mail during the COVID-19 crisis.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of theUnited States of America 117(40): 24640–24642.
Mebane, Walter. 2008. “Election Forensics: The Second-Digit Benford’s Law Test and Recent American Presidential Elections.” Election Fraud: Detecting and Deterring Electoral
Manipulation pp. 162–181.
Minnite, Lorraine C. 2010. The Myth of Voter Fraud. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

12Thompson, Daniel M., Jennifer A. Wu, Jesse Yoder, and Andrew B. Hall. 2020. “Universal
Vote-by-mail Has No Impact on Partisan Turnout or Vote Share.” Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences 117(25): 14052–14056.

13

Online Appendix
Intended for online publication only.

Contents
A.1

Sensitivity of Potential Case Rate Calculation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

2

A.1

Sensitivity of Potential Case Rate Calculation

Throughout the paper, we estimate the number of potential cases of fraud using the rateof positive cases as a share of cases we can confirm either way and multiplying this by the
number of potential cases. This calculation assumes that the cases we cannot confirm havea similar number of positives as the cases we can confirm. We cannot directly confirm thisassumption. Still, we can rule out that the cases we fail to confirm are clearly different fromthe cases we can confirm in ways that would make them much more likely to be positive if
we could confirm them.
To assess the possibility that the unconfirmed cases are different in important, observableways, we estimate the rate of positive cases after accounting for observable characteristicsof the case that may relate to the likelihood that the case is positive. We use logistic
regressions of a flag for positive cases on a set of covariates, and calculate the average
predicted probability of a positive for each potential case including the cases we cannot
confirm either way. In each regression, an observation is a potential link, meaning that
voters can be linked to multiple death records and some are in this analysis.
Table A.1 reports our estimates. In column 1, we report the positivity rate using thesimple approach we use in the paper. In our regression framework, this is equivalent toon constant-only regression—assuming that all cases have an equal probability of being
positive regardless of their characteristics. In column 2, we report estimates after relaxing
this assumption, instead calculating a probability that a case is positive for each match type.
We categorize the matches into five categories: exact name match; first and last name match
but middle initial is missing in both records; first and last name match but middle initial ismissing in one record; first and last name match but middle initials are different; last namematches but first name is slightly different. This adjustment does not meaningfully change
our estimate of the positivity rate.
Column 3 accounts for the population of the county in which the person lived and voted.
Since we are more likely to find positive—probably false positive—cases in counties withmany people, adjusting for the county population could change our expected positivity rate
if the unconfirmed and confirmed cases came from different counties. In column four, we
adjust for the commonness of the decedent’s last name, suspecting that common last names
also increase the rate of false positives. We find that both of these adjustments are notconsequential.
In column 5, we adjust for the availability of Social Security Death Index (SSDI). People
born prior to 1936 or who died after 2014 may not be listed in the SSDI. When we adjust for
this, our positivity rate goes up modestly. While we cannot directly translate this estimate

2

Table A.1 – Sensitivity of Plausible Case Rate Calculation.

Plausible Cases/Potential Cases
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
0.00480.00470.00460.00470.0061

No
No
No
No

Yes
No
No
No

Yes
Yes
No
No

Yes
Yes
Yes
No

Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes

Controls
Match Type Dummies
Log(Deaths in County)
Log(Last Name Freq in Death Records)
SSDI Records Availability Dummy

Each cell reports an estimate of the share of plausible links that would be potential links. Estimates
are average predicted probabilities from logistic regressions. Each regression regresses a dummy
variable for a potential case on covariates expected to predict potential cases. Regressions are
estimated using cases where the scraper finds definitive evidence of a potential case or rules thecase out. The share of plausible links is estimated by using the regression to extrapolate to thecases the automated searching algorithm cannot classify.

into a number of voters, we can approximate how these differences would change our main
point estimate by inflating the rate we use for imputation by 0.0061
from columns 5 and 1.
0.0048This would increase our point estimate from 53 to 68.
In total, Table 2 tells us that our simple method of estimating the rate of plausible cases
produces similar results as other methods that explicitly adjust for differences between thecases we can confirm and those we cannot.

3