In Chicago, the dead may vote, but in New York, they’re fined.

It’s no great secret that NYPD officers have quotas to meet, like many other police. Sure, in New York the quotas consist of shooting bodega workers, but that’s only because shooting iron workers gets you strange looks and a visit from members of Local 399.

But New York police are burdened with a secondary level of quotas: the issuing of citations. Lest you think that there are more than enough scofflaws to go around in the Big Apple, consider the case of poor Paul Pizzuto, who was forced to issue citations to the dead just to keep up.

The 17-year vet says he had “always issued summonses to motorists who deserved the summonses” and “did not want to issue summonses just to fulfill an increased quota,” the suit says — so he hatched a scam to fudge his numbers.

Pizzuto “prepared summonses by taking information from legitimate summonses that he had issued in the past. But he prepared the summonses in such a way that [they] would not impact any motorists,” the filing says.

He was busted for the scam in July of last year, after his colleagues noticed he never had to testify about the tickets.

At the time of his arrest, police said his reasons for writing the bogus tickets — some of which were written to motorists who were long dead — were far from altruistic.

The married father of two had been having severe financial problems and had been doling out the tickets as a way of padding his overtime, cops said.

Now here’s the inside scoop: what this story fails to report is that, in New York, the dead are frequently fined for being insufficiently alive to sustain a healthy lifestyle, and thus more likely to need emergency-room services. This clogs an already overburdened system, resulting in long wait times for resuscitation.

Legislation was introduced by Democrats in Albany that would have forced the dead to pay “their fair share,” but it was scotched by Republicans who insisted that the dead were the economic engine of the Empire State, what with their tourist appeal, and that further penalizing them would drive them out of New York and into New Jersey, where they enjoy special privileges and often reside in gated communities.

In fact, Governor Chris Christie has begun a PR campaign, enticing the dead over the George Washington Bridge and through the Lincoln Tunnel, with results typical for rush hour.