City Clerk Janice Winfrey is set in less than a month to eliminate from voting rolls the names of nearly 55,000 dead people and those who no longer live in Detroit, as she undertakes a blitzkrieg aimed at restoring integrity and respect to Detroit elections. Winfrey, a political novice and former math teacher, was able to do in six months something her predecessor, Jackie Currie, didn't do for years. "It was very easy," Winfrey said, explaining she bought "death lists" from the state and city Health Department so the names of the deceased could be purged. Then she moved to eliminate the names of people who hadn't cast a ballot since before the 2002 election and who had been mailed voter card registration renewal forms that were returned by the U.S. Postal Service as undeliverable. Already the names of about 33,000 deceased voters have been removed. The rest can be removed after the August primary. Winfrey estimates another 40,000 names can be removed under a similar process in 2008.Currie said she didn't have the power to clean up the voter rolls, which she claimed could be done only by state officials. Winfrey beat Currie last year amid a growing drumbeat for an overhaul of city elections. Before the election, The Detroit News found that Currie's assistants had improperly distributed ballots and coaxed legally incapacitated people into filling out absentee ballots and that absentee ballot applications were being sent to vacant lots, abandoned nursing homes and in one case even a facility used to house juveniles in trouble with the law.