If you vote by mail but die before Election Day, does your vote count? It depends on where you lived.

Oregon counts ballots no matter what happens to the voter. So does Florida. But in South Dakota, if you die before the election, so does your vote.

In Virginia, Board of Elections officials contacted yesterday said the answer is unclear because of conflicting rulings by different attorneys general. They are seeking a clarification, they said.

Increasingly popular mail-in ballots mean voters can choose candidates up to 60 days before an election, raising new questions about an age-old phenomenon normally associated with chicanery: What should be done with the ballots of the recently dead?

Laws in at least a dozen states are split evenly between tallying and dumping the votes. No one keeps records on how often such deaths occur.

One case involves Florence Steen, an ailing 88-year-old grandmother. A last wish of hers was to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton. She wanted to be part of history, daughter Kathy Krause said.

After the South Dakota woman died in May, her daughter mailed the ballot.

"In my mind, her vote counted," Krause said. "My mother believed she had voted for a woman to be president."

But officials at the county courthouse told Krause the ballot had to be tossed because state law declared a voter must be alive on Election Day. So Krause passed that word to the Clinton campaign. And Clinton drew great applause when she told the story in her concession speech four days after the South Dakota primary.

Krause plans to lobby state legislators to reverse the law.

"What about the soldiers in Iraq? What if they vote and they're killed in action, God forbid? Should we take away their vote because they died for their country?"

There are no military standards on voting by soldiers. Rather, their mailed-in ballots are counted at the individual election districts where they are registered to vote.

Thirty-one states allow some form of early voting. Mail-in ballots arrived in record numbers during this year's protracted primary season. Election experts have predicted that as many as 25 percent of voters will vote by mail in November.

South Dakota Secretary of State Chris Nelson said he doesn't understand why a dead person's vote should be counted.

"In my mind, it's clear," Nelson said. "You have to be a qualified voter on Election Day. I don't know how someone can say you're a qualified voter if you're deceased."

Pam Smith, director of the advocacy group Verified Voting, disagrees: "By definition, the day you cast a ballot is Election Day. That's it."