The program "Time" in the plot about the elections to the US Congress reports :
“And again scandals with“ dead souls ”. It directly became some kind of electoral feature of the American vote. In a country where the slogan “You can't help but die and pay taxes, the rest is possible” is popular, for some reason dead people are included in the lists of candidates. In the states of Pennsylvania and Tennessee, two Democrats who are no longer alive were re-elected. Apparently, according to the version of the Democratic Party, you still can’t die.”
RIA Novosti circulated a statement by State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, made in his Telegram channel (punctuation preserved):
“Afterword to the US Elections, or the Dead Souls of American Politics.
Washington, which claims to be a model of democracy, likes to criticize our electoral system.
A couple of examples proving that the standards promoted by the United States are worthless, and the American political system is literally dead.
Democratic Congressman Tony DeLuca won in Pennsylvania with 85% of the vote. An interesting moment – as it turned out, he died in early October. His name was not removed from the ballot. DeLuca's rival is tired of emphasizing in her addresses to voters that she is the only living candidate in the district. But the dead man won anyway.
This case is not the only one. In Tennessee, 72% of the vote was cast for Democratic Representative Barbara Cooper, who died in October.
Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol would have liked the plot.
Indeed, two candidates were elected at the last elections, who were no longer alive at the time of voting. But there is no scandal here, everything happened in strict accordance with the laws of the states of Pennsylvania and Tennessee.
Both candidates, Anthony Deluca, 85, of Pennsylvania and Barbara Cooper, 93, of Tennessee, have died since the end of the nomination campaign. Under state law, ballots cannot be changed at this time.
The voters were well aware that the candidates were dead; Volodin himself admits that Deluca's rival, Queonia "Zara" Livingston of the Green Party, emphasized that she was "the only living candidate" (the Republicans did not field a candidate in this district). But 82% of voters cast their ballots for the deceased Deluca, counting on a new early election, since for them this is the only legal way to achieve the election of a candidate from the Democratic Party to the federal Congress.
The same thing happened in Tennessee, where in one of the districts the deceased Barbara Cooper defeated independent candidate Michael Porter in the elections to the State House of Representatives, gaining 64% of the vote.
