November 7th--Night of the living dead?

With Halloween upon us, we are often regaled with tales of witches, beasties and other ghostly things that go bump in the night and visit havoc upon earthly beings.

Well, in New York on November 7th, ghosts may once more come to visit and wreak havoc upon earthly inhabitants. But rather than going "bump" in the night, these spectres will do something far more nefarious.

They will vote democrat.

Steven T. Vermilye was a home inspector and general contractor who grew up in Croton-on-Hudson - he and his father helped build the boat launch at Senasqua Park - went to college in Texas and settled in New Paltz in 1971.

Betty L. Johnson came from a small town in Virginia and moved to Beacon when she was 17, where she raised eight children while boxing duct tape at Tuck Tape and working in the kitchen at the Castle Point Veterans Hospital.

David S. Stairs was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and came to the mid-Hudson Valley in 1927, where as a 16-year-old he pounded hot rivets into the New York Central Railroad at Croton-Harmon and then spent 45 years working his way up through Texaco's research center in Glenham.

The three mid-Hudson Valley residents had little in common during their lives, but share one thing now: Records exist of them casting a vote after they died.

A new statewide database of registered voters contains as many as 77,000 dead people on its rolls, and as many as 2,600 of them have cast votes from the grave, according to a Poughkeepsie Journal computer-assisted analysis.

Of course this is nothing new. Aside from past Vice Presidential candidates channeling the dead to earn untold millions, democrats have proven themselves to be quite adept at channeling the dead as part and parcel of their GOTV efforts.

So, those of you in New York, Seattle, St. Louis, Chicago, and other democrat strongholds, when you bundle your little ones and take them out tomorrow night for "trick or treat", remember that there may indeed be "dead men walking" among you.

And they vote.