Our story about how someone may have cast a vote for a dead woman in the fiercely waged Dallas District 1 city council election could renew the debate on voter ID legislation, which House Democrats managed to shelve this session. But, in fact, the bill would've had no relevance here since that proposal focused on what happens at the ballot box.

In our reporting about Juana Rodriguez, a woman who is believed to have died in February, the questionable vote came from a mail-in ballot. (Read more discussion about our story on Unfair Park and CBS 11's coverage here.)

Interestingly, mail-in votes may be where the most notable cases of fraud occur, and yet nearly all the debate this legislative session centered on fixing elections at a local polling place.

One way municipalities can prevent voter fraud is to update their voter rolls as often as possible. If you don't have any dead people on the rolls, no one can vote in their names. But keeping only the living on a voter roster is a challenge in a populous county like Dallas.

In October, Texas Watchdog investigated whether voter fraud could happen in the Big D. The answer, in effect, was yes. We uncovered 6,000 registered voters whose key personal data — names and dates of birth — matches those listed in federal databases of dead people.

That may or may not seem like a large number, and you probably couldn't tilt a mayoral election just by casting votes from the grave.

But in the District 1 council race in Dallas, only 198 votes separated the top two vote-getters. Those two, Delia Jasso and Justin Epker, will now face each other in a runoff election in which a tiny sliver of registered voters will likely show up at the polls. Here every vote really will count. Live or dead.