Drop Dead Electable: US Politicians Voted Into Office Even After Passing Away

93-year-old Tennessee Statehouse Representative Barbara Cooper (D) was elected on Tuesday, handily defeating her Republican opponent and picking up another term in a seat she’s held for 26 years. There’s just one problem: Mrs. Cooper died on October 25. A special election has been scheduled to pick her replacement. Apparently, Tennessee law mandates that candidates remain on the ballot even if they’ve gone to meet their maker.

Cooper wasn’t the only candidate to get elected despite being dead. In Pennsylvania, 85-year-old Tony DeLuca, another Democrat, won a landslide victory in the election to the state legislature, a position he’d held since 1983, taking a whopping 86 percent of the vote. Unfortunately, the politician died from lymphoma on October 9. DeLuca’s name remained on the ballot in accordance with a law that says substitute candidates cannot be entered after ballots are printed. His seat will also be up for grabs in a special election.

Meanwhile, in the San Diego suburb of Chula Vista, Democrat Simon Silva is on course to winning his race for the job of city attorney, despite passing away with cancer on September 3. The appearance of Silva’s name on the ballot caused some controversy, with his Republican opponent, Dan Smith, pointing out that it will cost an estimated $2 million to hold a special election in 2023 to replace him. The city’s mayor, Mary Salas, has taken flak for backing Silva despite his death.

“I’m really disappointed that people come to this council meeting and disrespect the honor and the history and the goodness of the man that was running for city attorney,” Salas said at a city council meeting in September.

With thousands of federal, state and local posts up for grabs each time the US holds its biannual elections, it seems at least one deceased candidate gets through each cycle, notwithstanding their terminal medical condition.

In November 2020, Republican candidate for North Dakota’s House of Representatives David Andahl handily defeated his Democratic rivals, despite dying from complications with Covid a month before the vote. Andahl was 55.

The same year, 66-year-old Republican Roy Edwards, who was running unopposed for the Wyoming House of Representatives, died unexpectedly, also with complications from Covid, a day before the vote.

In 2018, seedy 72-year-old Nevada brothel owner Dennis Hof (R) handily won his race for the State National Assembly despite being dead, defeating Democrat Lesia Romanov, a school administrator. Hof’s death didn’t trigger a special election, with Nevada law allowing officials to simply appoint a replacement.

Also in 2018, 62-year-old Pennsylvania House of Representatives incumbent Sid Michaels Kavulich (D) died of complications from heart surgery three weeks before the election. He was running unopposed.

The same cycle, Charles Turbiville, a Republican legislator in the South Dakota House of Representatives, died in late October, but won reelection anyway. He was 75. In accordance with South Dakota state law, Turbiville’s replacement was picked by Governor Dennis Daugaard.

The election of dead politicians isn’t limited to lower offices. In 1972, Democratic House Majority leader Hale Boggs died in a plane crash in Alaska along with Congressman Nick Begich (D). Boggs, a member of the Warren Commission investigating the Kennedy assassination, was 58 when he died. His body was never found. A year before his death, he gave a fiery speech on the House floor denouncing the FBI and its longtime chief, J. Edgar Hoover. The same year, he accused America’s elites and a “secret police within our system” of taking “vast new powers” which undermined the civil liberties of the American people. Both Boggs and Begich were posthumously reelected three weeks after their deaths, with special elections subsequently held to replace them.

In 2000, 66-year-old Democratic Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan was killed in a plane crash, but posthumously elected to the Senate anyway after an acrimony-filled race against Republican Senator John Ashcroft – George. W. Bush’s future attorney general, and one of the architects of the Patriot Act. Carnahan’s death has given rise to a host of conspiracy theories, including speculation that he may have been murdered. There is no official evidence to verify these allegations.

America’s size and the diversity and the rigidity of US state law makes the nation fairly unique in the frequency with which dead candidates seem to get elected. However, Americans aren’t alone in facing this curious predicament, which actually goes back centuries.

In the 1945 general elections in Britain, Conservative Party politicians 61-year-old Leslie Pym and 66-year-old Sir Edward Campbell were posthumously elected in the constituencies of Monmouth and Bromley, both dying over a week before election results were announced. The politicians’ deaths triggered by-elections.

In 1906, while Ireland was still a part of Britain, 40-year-old Irish Parliamentary Party politician Thomas Higgins handily won a seat in the House of Commons, but died of a heart attack on election night.

In 1747, 37-year-old Royal Navy officer Edward Legge was elected MP in an unopposed election from the constituency of Portsmouth, despite dying nearly three months earlier in the West Indies.