From the Washington Post:

President Donald Trump and those around him threw a multitude of voter-fraud conspiracy theories at the wall after the 2020 election. And few were as pervasive as the idea that people rose from the dead to help defeat Trump’s reelection bid.2021 Election: Complete coverage and analysis

Unlike many of the often-nebulous claims, these ones carried the benefit of often having been rather specific — citing actual dead people, by name, who supposedly voted. This made them actually verifiable.

Nearly a year later, those specific claims have provided a case study in — and a microcosm of — just how ridiculous this whole exercise was.

The specific dead people cited by Trump and his allies have, in most cases, proved to not actually have been cases of dead people’s identities used fraudulently to vote. And in several other cases, in which a dead person was actually recorded as voting, the culprit has been identified: not a systemic effort to inflate vote totals for President Biden, but rather a Republican….

Backers of Trump’s fraud claims will look at the above and note that some of these instances have resulted in fraud charges. And that’s true!

But even if you set aside the fact that the proven instances involve fraud by Republicans and Trump backers, not Democrats, these involve not apparent systemic fraud but rather people seeking to exploit unusual circumstances involving recent deaths of their own loved ones….

More than anything, it suggests isolated instances of people doing dumb things — potentially when convinced, despite the lack of evidence, that their own side was targeted by such tactics. (“In his political frustration, he chose to do something stupid,” said Samuel Stretton, the attorney for Bruce Bartman. “And for that he is very sorry.”)

And more than anything, it points to the folly of lifting these up as some of the best evidence available. The Trump team and its allies cited supposedly thousands of dead voters in multiple states, but for some reason when they named actual people, the cases didn’t pan out. These were repeatedly hailed not just on Carlson’s show or by the Nevada GOP as firm evidence of fraud, but also by the Trump campaign.

Nearly a year later, basically none of the Trump team’s allegations of voter fraud have actually panned out. But the dead-voters allegation is instructive in that it has proved especially specious — and if anything, according to the examples cited by the Trump campaign itself, points more to an effort to help Trump than hurt him.