In my neighborhood, it's traditional to plant a tree in the nearby park when one among us dies.

Trees don't vote but, at least in my neighborhood, some are still registered.

I need to explain. I got an e-mail from a woman in Oakmont on Tuesday suggesting that I take a look at the "street lists" provided by the Allegheny County Elections Division, just to see how many registered voters are dead or have moved away.

That seemed a swell way to kill an afternoon. So I walked down to the County Office Building, paid four bucks for the list of registered voters in my little Allegheny West neighborhood, and found a place at a Market Square table to scan the names on my street.

There was the kind widow who died in 2002 and, farther up the road, the dapper man who died that same year. Both remain registered to vote.

There was a third death, and a dozen or more people who had moved away, many of them years ago, most of them out of state. Yet all are still eligible to vote in the city's 22nd Ward, and there doesn't appear to be a thing I can do about it.

I bring this up today because, after the primary election next week, you will hear the media report that some tiny percentage of registered voters came out to vote. But if thousands of registered voters have died or moved away, this traditional election report severely overstates our apathy quotient.

My street is a stable one, with a high percentage of homeowners, so these locked-in Election Day no-shows amount to only a little more than 1 percent of the voters registered there. But around the corner, there's a senior citizens high rise, and an insider there looked at my list and told me that 29 of the 115 names listed at that address no longer live there.

Don Friedman, a North Side political consultant, guesses that 10 to 15 percent of the people eligible to vote "don't exist here any longer." That said, this is still an improvement over the recent past. The state has taken a more direct role in providing death certificates and driver's license address changes to county elections managers.

These street lists, free to candidates, can waste a lot of their time. So Mr. Friedman provides lists of "super voters." That way, a would-be district judge or mayor can knock only on the doors of people who are likely to vote in a given election.

The good news is, despite all the urban legends, Mr. Friedman has never found any dead people voting.

The county removed 50,000 names from the list of eligible voters at the start of the year, bringing the total down around 900,000. But the law for removing a name is strict and tedious, and nobody can remove a name simply by calling in and saying, "A hearse just rolled my neighbor away."

Mark Wolosik, the county elections manager, said state law once allowed names to be pulled from voting lists if a person didn't vote in two consecutive calendar years, but no more. Now it can take as long as eight years.

For instance, if the U.S. Postal Service notifies the county of a change of address, the law requires election officials to send a notice to the old address, forwardable to the new, asking the voter to confirm the move. If there is no response, a second notice will be sent to the address, telling the voter his or her registration will be canceled if two federal elections pass without a vote.

A person might also be notified if he or she doesn't vote for five consecutive years. The notification is basically the same: Your name will be pulled if you don't vote in the next two federal elections, which occur every two years.

So the entire process might take as long as eight years. Next year, at this time, perhaps the deceased from my street will be removed, along with some of those who moved away.

It's just not going to happen any sooner than the law allows. A family member can go to a polling place next Tuesday and ask for a form to remove a deceased relative from the rolls, but a neighbor can't do the same.

"List maintenance has to be uniform and non-discriminatory," Mr. Wolosik said.

The county can't chance that someone is just trying to remove only Democrats, or only Republicans, or only old people, or only white people, or anything else. It has to wait. Mr. Wolosik couldn't even remove his own erstwhile neighbors in Shaler, though he knew the couple had moved to Ohio. He had to wait until two even-numbered-year elections passed.

I guess as long as I don't see any trees in line at the polling place, I must be patient, too.