More than 60 million voters have cast ballots in the election so far. And it’s a grim reality that some of them have already died.

Laws in 10 states specifically order their ballots to be counted the same as anyone else’s, while about half of the states lack any firm policy one way or another, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, an information clearinghouse on state policies.

But three states allow ballots to be challenged on grounds that the voter has since died. And 11 other states, either through law or policy, specifically prohibit dead voters’ ballots from counting.

Good luck finding those ballots, however.

“I do not know of any states that watch that closely — to actually check the deaths every day as ballots are coming in,” said Cleta Mitchell, an election lawyer and chairman of the conservative-leaning Public Interest Legal Foundation. “So my assumption is that those ballots are still counted regardless of what the state law says.”

Some election officials in states where dead voters’ ballots are supposed to be tossed told The Washington Times they can try to block the vote, but that requires being alerted someone has died.

“Any voter who is aware of an individual that has passed away before Election Day after casting their absentee ballot can challenge that ballot,” said Anna Sventek at the secretary of state’s office in New Hampshire.

In Pennsylvania, the state department said it would reject a deceased voter’s mail-in ballot, though state law explicitly says elections can’t be invalidated if the ballots do get counted.

Local officials said if somebody votes early in person, that would be impossible to spot and said even culling mailed-in ballots is tricky.

The NCSL agrees with those officials.

“As a practical matter, it is hard to retrieve ballots from people who have died between casting their votes and Election Day,” NCSL says in its memo detailing the current practices. “Once the absentee ballot has been verified and removed from the envelope for counting, the ballot cannot be retraced to the voter. Catching a ballot, then, is only possible when it is still in its return envelope and only in cases where election officials have received notice of the death.”

The Washington Times contacted a half-dozen jurisdictions where laws require the rejection of dead voters’ early ballots. None was able to provide a count for the number of ballots disqualified.

The issue drew attention this year after former President Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 earlier this month, cast an early ballot in Georgia. That’s one of the states that doesn’t have any explicit law governing voters who die before Election Day, so the consensus is that it will be counted.

Elections used to be a definitive snapshot of how a group of people voted on a specific day. But as states move to expand early and absentee voting, elections are increasingly an approximation of where a much larger group of people are over the six weeks leading up to a final Election Day.

The move to mail-based voting creates other wrinkles, with live ballots floating around communities.

In Colorado, one of the mailed-ballot states, one county reported a dozen ballots stolen from the mail. Three of them were already tallied in the 2024 election. A fourth was about to be counted, but the actual voter, who never received the ballot, got an alert that it was being processed and notified officials.

In Vancouver, Washington, a fire engulfed a drop-off ballot box, ruining about 475 ballots and sending local election officials scrambling to figure out what to do.

The county auditor said they believe they can get information off many of the ballots to notify voters. But they’re also asking people who dropped off a ballot in the 40 hours between the last ballot pickup and the fire to check online to see if the county had processed their vote.

The ballot box had a fire suppression system that failed.

Just across the state line in Portland, Oregon, another incendiary device went off inside a ballot box, but that suppression system worked and only a few ballots were scorched.

The numbers are small compared to the 160 million people who voted in the 2020 presidential election.

There’s no way of knowing how many dead voters’ early ballots are counted — nor how many of those were cast in states where it is supposed to be illegal.

All of this would have been unfathomable to George Washington and his fellow founders, who cast their votes in open session, answering out loud when the sheriff called their names.

By the late 1800s, the secret ballot had become standard, protecting the privacy of the vote. But Election Day was still a singular event.

Fifty years ago, just 2.5% of ballots were cast early, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab. In 2000 it was 14%. In 2020, amid the pandemic, it was nearly 70%. In 2022, that slid back to 47% — still the second highest on record.

Ms. Mitchell said she encouraged people to vote early in person.

“There are so many problems with the [postal service] and mail delivery this year, and I think people are realizing that to secure your vote, you need to vote in person,” she said.

• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.