In this business, we sometimes have to step away from a story we've been working on for months... and declare it dead.

It doesn't matter how much time we may have invested or how much money we've spent on data analysis and other research... if the story is not there, there's no story to tell.

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To be honest with you, I never set out to do a story about Social Security and the errors that land people on "the dead list." We were actually trying to do a story about voter fraud -- specifically, people who voted from the grave.

With the help of some friends at the National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting, we took a database of voting records from the November, 2006 election and cross-referenced it with the Social Security Death Index.

What we expected to find was a handful of dead people who cast ballots -- a pretty solid indicator of voter fraud.

With all the consternation about Missouri's voter identification law, this seemed like a timely story and a good experiment. So we proceeded.

When the software spit out 100 or so names, we were feeling pretty good about our little experiment. All we had to do was confirm the voter and the dead person were, in fact, the same person. Thanks to public records, that's not as hard as it sounds.

Within a few hours, I had eliminated all the bad matches. You would be surprised how many people share the exact same name and the same birthday. Thankfully, I'm the only Steve Chamraz in the country... so I'll never have that problem.

This left me with about 30 cases where the voter and the dead person were a perfect match. It's not 100, but when 30 people rise from the grave to cast a ballot... it's still one heck of a story.

My next stop was the St. Louis city and county election boards. These would be the places that would pound the nails in the coffins, so to speak. If a dead person cast a ballot, there would be a record of it here.

If.

It's the biggest two-letter word I know of.

The friendly folks at the election boards pulled the record of each voter who turned up as dead. We had voter cards, signatures, you name it.

We sat at conference tables and pored over each instance... only to find no dead people voted.

Not a one.

We found election judges who were sloppy at scanning in the names of voters who cast ballots... an error, yes. But a small, insignificant error. Most of our matches were attributed to another type of error -- voters who accidentally signed the election log books on the line allocated for their deceased sons, husbands and wives.

That left us with another handful of people who had voted and appeared to be very much alive.

I grabbed the phone and started calling them up. If they didn't answer, I went and knocked on their doors.

Not only were all of them alive, they were all erroneously "killed" by social security. And they had some interesting stories to tell about their "deaths."

"The dead list" investigation just snowballed from there.

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So that's the story behind the story.

It isn't always a pretty process, but it's always worthwhile.