MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) Alabama's voter registration rolls once were so loaded with dead people they became fodder for Jay Leno's monologue on the "Tonight Show."

The graveyard vote no longer exists, though.

The state just completed a 13-year project to clean up the voter rolls by removing more than 150,000 voters who had died. Another 50,000 were taken off because they had moved away.

"Clean voter lists are essential to honest elections; our voter lists are as clean now as they've been in 100 years," Secretary of State Jim Bennett said on Thursday.

Bennett, a former state senator, sponsored the legislation in 1989 that called for voter rolls to be cleaned up and computerized. A lack of funding stretched out the project nine years longer than planned.

It was completed last week, making Alabama one of 40 states with completely computerized records.

"We have no dead ones voting now that we know of," said Lanelle Turner, president of the Alabama Association of Boards of Registrars.

In 1987, more than a dozen counties had more registered voters on the paper-and-pencil rolls than adults living in the county. State officials were concerned some people might use the names of the dead to vote more than once.

Then, they were embarrassed the night Leno held up a Birmingham News headline about Bennett's legislation: "No more dead to vote in state."

Bennett's legislation set up the state Office of Voter Registration and required state agencies to notify election officials of all deaths and felony convictions so the names could be removed.

Thursday marked 11 years since the first county came online with the Alabama Voter Information Network; the last two signed on last week. Since its beginning, the project has removed about 10 percent of the names from Alabama's voter rolls.

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