340 Ridgewell County Residents Classified as Dead Are Asking the County to Double-Check
A batch processing error on the Annual Wellness Census caused the word 'present' to be interpreted as past tense, then as absence, then as death. All 340 r
By Hester Grume·June 30, 2026
A batch processing error on the Annual Wellness Census caused the word 'present' to be interpreted as past tense, then as absence, then as death. All 340 residents remain alive. Most want their library cards back.
Three hundred and forty Ridgewell County residents who are alive, breathing, and in several cases actively paying taxes have been officially classified as deceased by the county's public health database for an average of 2.3 years, following what officials are calling a "multi-system interpretive cascade" triggered by a scanning error on the Annual Wellness Census intake form.
All 340 residents are confirmed alive. The county has issued a formal correction and introduced a new supplemental form, WC-11-R ("Proof of Continued Existence"), which affected individuals must complete in person at the Office of Vital Records during business hours.
"We want to stress that nobody actually died," said Ridgewell County Director of Public Health Miriam Strake at a press conference Monday. "The system believed they had died. There is a meaningful administrative distinction, and we are working to close the gap between it and reality."
The error has been traced to a firmware update applied in 2022 to the optical scanning system that processes Form WC-11, the county's Annual Wellness Census intake document. The form includes a checkbox reading "I am present for this census." Following the firmware update, the scanner began misreading the checkbox as "I was present for this census."
According to the county's postmortem report, released Friday, the past-tense reading was ingested by the Population Status Module, which interpreted "was present" as "is no longer present." That designation was then passed to the Residency Verification System, which flagged each individual as "status: absent, unconfirmed." The absent-unconfirmed flag, in turn, triggered an automated query to the Inter-Departmental Mortality Index, which, upon finding no record of the individuals, created one.
"The system did not find a death record, so it generated a death record," said county IT Director Aldous Frett, reading from the postmortem. "The logic, as designed, was: if a person is marked absent and no death certificate exists, the absence is unexplained, and an unexplained absence of sufficient duration should be resolved. The system resolved it."
Frett confirmed that the threshold for "sufficient duration" was set at eleven minutes.
"That is the default value," he said. "It was not changed during implementation."
The 340 affected residents span every district in the county. The earliest misclassification dates to March 2022, meaning some individuals have been administratively deceased for over four years. The average duration is 2.3 years. Fourteen residents were classified as dead on the same day they submitted their census forms. One, a poll worker named Gertrude Blisk, was marked deceased while still inside the census processing facility.
"I handed the form to the woman at the desk," Blisk said in an interview. "She scanned it, and then her screen made a sound, and she looked at me, and she looked at the screen, and she said, 'Ma'am, according to this, you are no longer with us.' I said, 'I'm standing right here.' She said, 'Yes, but the system disagrees.'"
Blisk, 71, said she spent the next three hours attempting to resolve the discrepancy before being told that the Office of Vital Records does not process corrections to death records on Tuesdays.
Form WC-11-R requires applicants to provide a current pulse rate and two forms of identification, one of which must be expired if originally canceled due to death status.
The downstream consequences of administrative death have been extensive. According to the county's review, 218 of the 340 affected residents had at least one government-issued credential revoked, including driver's licenses, fishing permits, and, in eleven cases, business operating licenses. One hundred and forty-three had insurance policies canceled or suspended. Sixty-one had library cards deactivated. Twenty-nine had their mail rerouted by the postal service to the Ridgewell County Morgue's unclaimed correspondence office, a division that, until this month, consisted of one part-time clerk and a filing cabinet.
"We received 29 individuals' worth of personal mail over a period of roughly two years," said Corwin Mast, the clerk in question. "Electric bills, birthday cards, a subscription to Poultry Hobbyist Monthly. I didn't open any of it. I did wonder why the dead were getting so much mail."
Mast said the volume of rerouted mail eventually required a second filing cabinet, which he requisitioned in January. The request is still pending.
Resident Nolan Dree, 44, a self-employed carpenter from the Millhaven district, said he was classified as deceased in June 2022 and did not discover the error until September of that year, when his health insurance denied a claim on the grounds that the policyholder was dead.
"I called them and said, 'I'm not dead,'" Dree said. "They said, 'According to the county, you are.' I said, 'The county is wrong.' They said, 'We don't adjudicate that.' I asked who does. They gave me a phone number. It was the morgue."
Dree spent four months attempting to reverse the classification through official channels before, he said, he "gave up and just started being dead." He has not filed taxes since 2022. He has not renewed his driver's license. He has not received a jury duty summons, a parking citation, or a notice from the county assessor's office in over three years.
"I'm not going to pretend it's been all bad," Dree said. He declined to say whether he intends to file Form WC-11-R.
"I'm thinking about it," he said. "There are pros and cons."
Dree is not alone in his ambivalence. County records show that of the 340 affected residents notified by mail (sent, this time, to their actual addresses), only 206 have filed or scheduled appointments to file the correction form. The county has not commented on whether it intends to pursue the remaining 134.
"Filing is voluntary," said Strake, the public health director. "We cannot compel a living person to prove they are alive. We can only make the form available and encourage compliance."
When asked whether the county considered simply reversing the classifications in bulk, Strake said the legal framework does not permit it. "A death record, once created, is a legal instrument," she said. "It can only be amended through the formal correction process, which requires the individual's presence, two forms of identification, and a current pulse reading. We cannot waive the pulse reading."
Form WC-11-R, which was developed over the past six weeks, is four pages long and requires applicants to provide proof of identity, proof of residence, a sworn attestation that they are not deceased, and the signature of a witness who can confirm they have seen the applicant "engage in at least one activity consistent with living" within the preceding 30 days. Acceptable activities are listed in an appendix and include breathing, eating, speaking, and "sustained bipedal locomotion."
The form also includes a section titled "Reason for Continued Existence," which the county says is optional but recommended.
"It helps with processing," Strake said.
County Commissioner Lenore Prattle, who chairs the Board's public health subcommittee, said the incident has prompted a broader review of the county's automated records systems. She acknowledged that the eleven-minute absence threshold was "perhaps not calibrated for the census context" and said the IT department has been directed to adjust it.
"We have raised the threshold to forty-five minutes," Prattle said. "Which we believe is sufficient for most census-related activities, including restroom breaks."
She did not address whether the scanning firmware would be updated.
As of Friday, the Office of Vital Records had processed 74 WC-11-R forms. Average processing time per form is approximately ninety minutes. The office is open Monday through Friday, 9 AM to 4 PM, closed Tuesdays.
Blisk, the poll worker who was declared dead while standing in the processing facility, said she filed her correction form on Thursday. She described the experience as "fine, except for the part where they asked me why I was still alive and I had to fill in a box."
