It’s a perfect Halloween story, a study by the Poughkepsie Journal alleges that as many as 77,000 dead people are on the New York statewide voter registry, and as many as 2,600 of them might have voted from the grave.

Here’s more from this creepy story:

A new statewide database of registered voters contains as many as 77,000 dead people on its rolls, and as many as 2,600 of them have cast votes from the grave, according to a Poughkeepsie Journal computer-assisted analysis.

The Journal’s analysis of New York’s 3-month-old database is the first to determine the potential for errors and fraud in voting. It matched names, dates of birth and ZIP codes in the state’s database of 11.7 million voter registration records against the same information in the Social Security Administration’s “Death Master File.” That database has 77 million records of deaths dating back to 1937.

The state database was current as of Oct. 4, the master death index through June.

And they also found that:

– There were dead people on the voter rolls in all of New York’s 62 counties and people in as many as 45 counties who had votes recorded after they had died.

– One Bronx address was listed as the home for as many as 191 registered voters who had died. The address is 5901 Palisade Ave., in Riverdale, site of the Hebrew Home for the Aged.

– Democrats who cast votes after they died outnumbered Republicans by more than 4 to 1. The reason: Most of them came from Democrat-dominated New York City, where the higher population produced more matches.

But the story does note that the instances of people seemingly voting from the grave appear to be instances of clerical error or other mistakes, not direct evidence of election fraud in New York. These numbers do provide some metrics on the the accuracy of statewide voter registries, however.