Pennsylvania's "dead"beat voters...

Taking lessons straight from the Chicago democrat playbook:

PITTSBURGH -- They went to the polls and their votes were counted even though they’d been dead for years.Target 11 investigator Rick Earle pored through mounds of data and discovered that thousands of dead voters are still on the Allegheny county election rolls.There are nearly a million people registered to vote Allegheny County, but we discovered that thousands of them aren't even living. So what's the big deal?

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The disturbing part, is that election workers at the polls aren't catching the problem. Mark Wolosik, head of the Allegheny County board of elections, blames the problems on clerical errors.

Wolosik said, “With that many records sometimes you have mismatches. People make mistakes. I hate to admit it, but we do, too.”Apparently relatives with similar names are voting for their deceased loved ones.Wolsik said, “The important thing is only person voted.”

Maybe true -- but voting in place of a deceased family member has led to criminal charges in other states. Here in Allegheny County, these voters had no idea they had been voting for their dead relatives.

Since 2002 all of Charles Beck's votes were tallied under his grandfather's name, even though Beck said he alerted poll workers shortly after his grandfather passed away.

Charles Beck said, “I told that lady, my grandfather's deceased at this address. He's gone. So can you cancel out his voter registration and she said she would take care of it. And that was the end of that.”

Wolosik says the county is now working to remove deceased voters from the registry.

Wolsik said, “I think the thing to keep in mind is, when you look at it percentage-wise it's not a very big number.”Marybeth Kuznik is the executive director of Vote PA. She said voters need to take their own precautions. “One of the best things we can do to combat this is if every voter would check his or her registration during the off season.”

To cut down on the potential for voter fraud, a state senator recently introduced legislation requiring voters to show a photo identification.

And that, my friends, may not happen, if Keith Ellison gets his way.