Even death can't stop some voters.

Thanks to the increasing popularity of absentee voting, a rising number of the recently deceased are casting ballots — legally.

The trick is to pull the lever before you kick the bucket.

States such as California, Texas and Florida intentionally count ballots sent in by voters who then died before Election Day, while states such as Colorado, Washington and South Dakota have no reliable method for discarding the votes of the deceased.

In the old days, voting by the dead was reserved for big-city political machines looking to stuff the ballot box illegally.

But the new kind of dead voting is a side effect of the popularity of absentee ballots.

In 32 states, any registered voter can mail in a ballot instead of going to a voting booth on Election Day, according to the Early Voting Information Center. And in 14 other states, they can do so as long as they have a good reason.

Depending on the state, absentee ballots are mailed any time from three weeks before the election, as in Maryland, to 40 days before the election, as in Iowa.

Some of those absentee voters die before Election Day comes around, however.

"This is a pretty small percentage of people," according to Thad Hall, a voting expert at the University of Utah. "There are tens of millions of people who voted by absentee ballot in the presidential election, but there aren't that many people who died right after casting their ballot."

What happens next depends on the state.

In 2008, the state of Hawaii counted Barack Obama’s grandmother's absentee ballot even though she died three days before Election Day.

However, when Hillary Rodham Clinton mentioned in a televised speech that 88-year-old Florence Steen of South Dakota had proudly cast her vote for a female candidate before dying, state elections officials disqualified Steen's vote.

If Steen had been a Florida resident when she sent in her ballot, her vote would have been counted.

Under Florida elections law, as long as the ballot was postmarked or received by the elections office, it doesn’t matter whether the voter "dies on or before Election Day."