Sunday’s Hartford Courant reported on the compilation of:

“a list of more than 300 people across Connecticut who appear to have voted from the grave in elections dating to 1994, a two-month investigation of voting records by journalism students at the University of Connecticut has found.

The mysterious voters were identified by matching a statewide database of 2 million registered voters and their voting histories with two separate computer lists of dead people maintained by the state Department of Public Health and the federal Social Security Administration.

Following up on the matches, UConn students examined the records of nearly 100 of the suspect voters at 10 town and city halls among those with the most cases. Guilford led the state with 39, followed by West Hartford (17), Enfield (15), Stonington (13) and Norwalk (11).

Apparently, the problem is largely one of clerical errors, not Chicago style politics. Nonetheless, it highlights a fundamental failure to coordinate information

“State records show that Carmella Vella, an Italian immigrant who settled in Enfield in 1913, voted there in 2005 and 2006. But Vella died across the state border in a Springfield hospital in 1998. The votes, it turned out, stem from clerical errors.

Neighboring towns are supposed to forward death certificates to a dead person’s hometown, but that doesn’t always happen, said Enfield’s recently retired Republican registrar, Vaughan Vanderscoff.

But proof of Vella’s death — a burial certificate for an Enfield cemetery — is on file in the town clerk’s office down the hall from the registrar.

Vella’s daughter-in-law, Barbara Vella, said she doesn’t understand why her husband’s mother was still registered.

“I’ve told them multiple times to take her off the list,” Vella said. “She is certainly deceased.”

Kozik, of the secretary of the state’s office, concedes: “There should be a better system of getting the death information to the registrars in a timely fashion. But I’m not exactly sure how we would do that.”"

Along with the hand counting of ballots, this is yet another feather in the cap of Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz.