It’s primary season and Joe Voter does the thing he has been doing since he was 18 years old: He steps into his neighborhood polling place.

The soft-spoken Joe is absorbed in thought, processing all of the information he has heard from the campaign trail over the past many months. Now, he is intent on performing his civic duty. He carries himself with such passivity that it is questionable whether the people who were playing gatekeeper with the ballots even noticed his presence.

Indeed, Mr. Voter is a smooth operator in the voting booth.

In silence, he makes his decisions and fills in some boxes. In silence, he finishes up, caps his pen and feeds his final choices into the ballot-eater. In silence, he grabs his “I voted today” sticker.

We know what you’re thinking now: You’re thinking that we need more cautious thought-expending voters like Joe Voter, right?

You would be wrong. Sadly for our democracy, Joe Voter is essentially Bruce Willis in “The Sixth Sense.”

Oh, yes, Joe Voter is — spoiler alert for those who aren’t up to date on their 10-year-old M. Night Shyamalan psychological thrillers — dead.

What’s worse, it seems that from time to time, especially in close elections, Joe Voter rises from the grave, reclaims his no-longer-rightful place on the state’s poorly maintained voting roll and makes his will heard at the poll.

Thankfully, those days seems numbered in Arizona.

A bill introduced by Sen. Jack Harper, R-Surprise, got the ball rolling toward updating Arizona’s voting roll. The bill put forth an idea in which the state would allow a nifty new thing called the Internet to be used as the means to report deceased persons and remove them from the voter roll. That would take the place of the technology the current system allows for: manual deletion.

Beyond helping take care of a process that has bogged down the state in unnecessary costs (for one thing, tighter maintenance on the voter rolls would ensure that a more accurate number of voting-related mail be printed up and shipped out), the plan would also stand as a prime example of what the state needs to be doing right now: Examining all aspects of its operations and finding ways to boost efficiency and streamline operations.

Even more, it would be following the will of Arizonans statewide. In November, nearly 2 million people voted on Proposition 105, a measure that looked to require any additional state taxes, fees or spending to be approved by a majority of all registered voters (including the deceased who were not cleared from the lists), rather than a majority of all of voters casting ballots. By a 2-3 ratio, Arizonans said “no” to the initiative.

Now, we hope Harper, already in good shape with the backing of Secretary of State Ken Bennett, can bring this plan to fruition and back up the desires of his constituents while setting a prudent example of how Arizona needs to be economical in all of its undertakings.

Besides, those who pass away in Arizona — may they all rest in peace — ought to be concerned with pall bearers, not poll-bearers.