Dead man elected in Washington state
(Image credit: iStock)

Criminal charges won't stop you from getting elected in America, and apparently neither will death: State Rep. Roger Freeman of the 30th District in Washington handily won his re-election on Tuesday — but he won't take office again because he died in October.

At the time of his death, about 15 percent of the district's voters had already mailed in their ballots. And by the time Election Day came around, many voters were not aware that Freeman had died, and apparently voted for the incumbent or along party lines anyway.

Freeman is not the first official to be elected posthumously. In 2010, Missouri voters accidentally elected a man who had likewise died in October, while in 1998 a woman won a runoff election in late August after dying in mid-July. And in 2013, an Oregon man was elected to his city council five months after his death, though in that case the victory was an intentional gesture of respect rather than the result of misinformation.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.