Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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6 OCTOBER 12-18, 2016 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM OPINION The Walking Dead is a popular television series about zombies taking over the world — or at least Atlanta. It starts its seventh season on October 23, just three days after early voting starts in North Carolina. What do zombies and voting have in common? Well, there's another popular activity taking place, and not just in Atlanta. It's called Walking Dead Voters. Yep, dead people are springing up around the country, slowly waddling to the polls. For example, in May, California found hundreds of dead voters stuffing the ballot box; 215 lost souls in the Los Angeles County area alone. Another 78 rose from their eternal slumber and voted in Colorado. It could be the mountain air, medical marijuana or just plain voodoo getting dead folks stirred up. The latest social media buzz alleges a James Madison University student and political organizer registered 19 dead Virginians as Democrats in that crucial swing state. Let's face it. As long as choosing our next president involves passionate ideology and competition, someone is going to game the election system, and not just the Russians. But it's not going to happen in Cumberland County as long as Michael Hyers has the stamina and postage stamps needed to clean out people on the county's Board of Election rolls who he believes are not supposed to be there. Hyers is an analytical sort. He retired from the Air Force as Chief of Training for Pope Air Force Base flight engineers. He earned an Industrial Engineering degree from Southern Illinois University, and worked in manufacturing for eight years before retiring again. He's an avid reader of the Carolina Plott Hound, a state news portal and political watchdog website. There, he read an article about the non-partisan Voter Integrity Project. It's a grassroots organization started in 2011 by businessman John Pizzo and retired Air Force Lt. Col. Jay DeLancy. They mined public data in North Carolina and Florida for voter irregularities and found people registered to vote but not eligible to be on juries … because they weren't U.S. citizens. And, they found 30,000 dead people registered to vote, including some who did. By accident, Hyers noticed that a neighbor's son was registered to the next door address four years after the family moved, yet had never voted. Being the inquisitive type, he then compared the names listed with the county to the addresses in his neighborhood where he knew people lived. That was his start. He took 24 challenges to the Cumberland County Board of Elections where he says his initial efforts didn't go smoothly. After the Board of Elections conferred with their attorneys, Hyers said he was able to remove 21 inactive voters from the rolls. Since then, he's fine-tuned his data mining from the N.C. Board of Elections web site. His Excel spreadsheet matrix allows him to track inactive voters. This work flow, rhythm, and methodology give him the efficiency to make this task his full- time passion. Therefore, Hyers spends a lot of time at the Board of Elections making his case and submitting challenges. Hyers emphasizes his is a non-partisan effort. He was a Democrat once, then switched to Republican. Neither was to his liking. He's now unaffiliated. He buys the paper, envelopes and print cartridges for the vast number of documents it takes to challenge each inactive voter. "But the postage is a killer," he said. Thus he never turns down a book of First Class Postage stamps. At first, his credit union gave him free notary service, but the manager shut him down. Others stepped in to help so he can avoid the $5 notary fee for hundreds of document he submits. Hyers last week said he found 24,178 names of voters who never voted. Of those, 350 have the registration date of 1/1/1900 (the default date used when the state went to electronic database in 2001). And, of those 350 names with the default 1/1/1900 registration date, 66 are listed as 116 years of age. Hyers believes inactive voter rolls are extremely susceptible to voter fraud, especially in a state that does not require voter identification and allows out-of- precinct voting. To be fair, the Cumberland County Board of Elections also works to eliminate inactive voters; however, state law requires the process to take up to eight years. The eight-year rule under which local boards operate can be shortened by a registered voter, like Mike Hyers, by using a legal provision that allows him to challenge inactive voter registrations. "He keeps us on our toes," says Board Chairman James Baker. "He has a real passion on this topic. "On August 26, 1974, I raised my right hand and swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States," says Hyers. He retired as a master sergeant in 1995, and said "Nowhere in my retirement orders did it say 'I no longer needed to support and defend the Constitution'." The Constitutional rights of the people to choose through their vote who shall lead our Republic is a Constitutional right that needs to be protected from fraud, he said. Dead Voters Are Real by JASON BRADY JASON BRADY. Columnist. COMMENTS? Editor@upandcomin- gweekly.com. 910.484.6200. What do the Walking Dead and elections have in common?