In theory, a law that says dead people can't vote sounds like a prudent and necessary precaution against Tammany Hall-type corruption or Mayor Daley-style election fraud.

In practice, all it did was deny an elderly Rapid City woman her deathbed wish. Florence Steen, 88, wanted a chance to vote for a woman for president of the United States before she died.

Steen, who was born just before woman's suffrage, died of congestive heart failure on May 10, at peace in the knowledge that she had cast a historic vote for Sen. Hillary Clinton by absentee ballot days earlier.

But a 1974 state law that says a voter must be alive on election day in order to be a legal voter in South Dakota forced Pennington County Auditor Julie Pearson to set Steen's ballot aside.

Steen's family and Hillary Clinton both think that's wrong. So do we.

Any vote, legally cast in the six-week absentee voting window before an election, should be counted. We urge the South Dakota Legislature to revisit this issue in 2009 and rescind the current law.

Secretary of State Chris Nelson disagrees. The law is designed to maintain the primacy of election day. While he's sympathetic to the disappointment of Steen's family, he thinks America's longstanding history honoring the sanctity of election day is more important than any one vote. While the privilege of absentee balloting is an exception to that history, it must not be used to negate the requirement that dead people don't get to vote. "It's about your legal status as of election day, not some day prior to that," Nelson explained.

Like Clinton, we think Steen's vote, which was so meaningful to so many as a symbolic gesture of women's rights, should have counted. Given our state's liberal policies toward absentee voting - it is allowed for any reason, or no reason at all - we think the sanctity of election day is already somewhat lost on most voters.

At this late date, there's nothing that can be done to count Steen's vote, from a legal or legislative, standpoint.

But we think there's still a way to grant Steen's dying wish and salvage her hope to help put a woman in the Oval Office for the first time.

We hope some registered Democratic voter, one who might otherwise skip this primary election for whatever reason, (apathy, inconvenience, lack of patriotism - take your pick) will instead be inspired by Steen's story to go vote. She - or he - can honor Steen's intention to vote for a woman for president, and her memory, by casting a vote in South Dakota's June 3 primary for Hillary Clinton in Steen's name.