The point was, in keeping with the context of the story and prior comments, that you didn't have to make up people to be able to ring up votes as an insider.
On the larger topic of voter registration, it shouldn't be that hard for them to keep relatively clean rolls. Even if it's not causing an issue, having clean rolls promotes the integrity of and trust in the voting system. I mean, most of the dead people voting is just people signing in the wrong spot.
I'm not sure how a federal registry would really help much. I doubt there are really people voting in multiple states. There is a federal ID - the passport. Although that is relatively expensive, but it is also valid for a much longer duration, so the card can be cheaper than a state ID. I do believe that state IDs should be free if people are under the poverty level, but I also have a hard time believing that $40ish dollars every 4 year is the real barrier (things like the documents needed to get one are a bigger pain in my opinion, like birth certificates, marriage certificates for name changes, bill with your name and address, etc; even more so for Real ID). Plus the hassle of spending hours at the DMV.
"So maybe let's kick the facetious "supposedly" of the last sentence."
I'm not being facetious. Many states have implemented new programs to clean up the voter rolls. There's very little data to show if it's any improvement. In part, that's because the problem had little baseline data to go on (few occurrences of dead people voting). The other part is that many places haven't been very strict about cleaning (like Philly having approximately 1M registered voters when there's maybe 700k eligible to vote just based on age). So not much to speak of on the actual "problem" side since it wasn't large to begin with. But also not much progress on the trust side with cleaning up.
Also, I think that 19 number is low. I thought they found something like 35 in Philly in one election (year 2016? out of the 6k dead people who voted). The rest were simple mistakes. Still not a big problem, but certainly more they 19 nationally in 25 years. Again, it's mostly a trust and integrity issue than a true functional issue.