San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
LOOPS, SLANTS AND CROSSED ‘T’S’ EXAMINED TO VERIFY SIGNATURES
Election workers scan mail-in ballot envelopes to safeguard against fraud
In three conference rooms at a Kearny Mesa office park, election workers sit quietly in front of computer screens, eyeballing the signatures of San Diego County voters.
They’re the heart of a screening process that happens before mail ballots for the Nov. 3 election get counted — before the envelopes they came back in even get opened.
Workers compare scanned images of voters’ return-envelope signatures with samples already on file at the county Registrar of Voters. It’s how they verify that the person returning a ballot is the person it was sent to, a safeguard against fraud.
Exact matches are not required. Instead, the workers are checking similarities in characteristics such as the slant of the letters. The loops in the “f’s,” “g’s,” “j’s,” “y’s,” and “z’s.” The spacing between the first and last names. How the “i’s” are dotted and the “t’s” crossed.
Two characteristics matching and a ballot is approved.
“They are looking for reasons to accept a ballot, not to reject it,” said Cynthia Paes, assistant registrar, as she watched the activity in a verification room last week. That echoes state regulations, which say “only a signature possessing multiple, significant, and obvious differing char
ELECTION 2020
acteristics” should get kicked out.
Still, rejections happen, a persistent problem here and throughout California. In the March primary, more than 100,000 ballots got culled statewide, about 1.4 percent of the total returned. In San Diego County, more than 6,200 were rejected, less than 1 percent of the total.
Statistically small numbers, but they can make a difference in close races. In a March special election in Carlsbad, Cori Schumacher won a City Council race by 768 votes. Will Moore captured a runoff spot in a San Diego City Council contest by 655.
Rejections have taken on added significance this election because for the first time in state history, in response to the coronavirus pandemic, every registered voter gets sent a mail ballot. (In March, about 72 percent of Californians voted that way.) That means more opportunity for error.
And the ballots are arriving during a highly charge presidential campaign already fraught with anxiety and awash in unfounded claims about voter fraud, fears about late mail delivery, and calls by President Donald Trump for his supporters to monitor voting places.
“A vast majority of voters don’t know that their ballot can get rejected,” said Mindy Romero, a political sociologist who directs the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. “There is a verification process, which is a good thing, but if more people knew about it, I think they’d be more careful with their ballots.”
Sure enough, back in the signature-verification room in Kearny Mesa, an election worker spots a problem. A voter printed his or her name on the return envelope instead of signing it. The printed version doesn’t match what’s on file.
“There’s not much we can do about comparing that one,” Paes said, glancing at the screen. It’s a common mistake, along with forgetting to sign the envelope.
But for the first time in a presidential election, both problems are fixable.
Young-voter problems
Young voters, those ages 18 to 24, are particularly susceptible to having their ballots rejected.
“There are three factors that work against them,” said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation. “They’re new to voting, they aren’t accustomed to making signatures, and they aren’t familiar with using the post office.”
Her nonpartisan, nonprofit group recently conducted a study of mail ballots in Sacramento, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties and found that young people had theirs kicked out at a rate three times that of the counties’ overall rejection rate.
Some “pre-register” at age 16, and by the time they actually begin voting years later, their signatures have changed and won’t match what’s on the ballot return envelopes. Or the comparison signature on file at the Registrar of Voters is from a driver’s license, also obtained years before casting the first ballot.
A lack of familiarity with the U.S. Postal Service comes into play because ballots also get rejected if they arrive too late. Statewide, and in San Diego County, that’s the single largest reason ballots get turned away. And unlike signature problems, there’s no way to cure that flaw.
By law, a ballot returned by mail has to be postmarked on or before Election Day. Some people assume that means they’ll be OK if they put it in a mailbox on Nov. 3.
That’s not necessarily true, depending on when the mail is collected and when it’s processed.
In the California Voter Foundation study, for example, most of the “too late” ballots from three elections in Sacramento County shared the same postmark — the day after Election Day.
The study also found that voters who returned their ballots to official drop boxes or to in-person polling places by closing time on Election Day (8 p.m.) were “much less likely” to have them rejected.
That’s not just because they avoid the late-postmark problem.
Election workers staffing drop boxes or polling places can point out missing signatures and other issues on the return envelopes before they get deposited, the study said.
In San Diego County, the registrar is urging voters to cast and return their ballots early, either through the mail or at official drop-off boxes, which have been open since Oct. 6. There are 126 of them in the county, including at the registrar’s office, which is also open for in-person voting. (Check hours and locations at the registrar’s website, sdvote.com.)
Additional in-person polling places open for four straight days on Oct. 31; mail ballots can be returned there, too.
Early returns
County voters seem to be heeding the call to return their ballots early.
By mid-day Thursday, the registrar’s office said, almost 270,000 ballots were in, about 14 percent of the 1.9 million sent to voters earlier this month. That compares with about 78,000 returned over the same period in 2016, the last presidential election.
According to ballot tracking by Political Data Inc., a bipartisan numberscrunching firm, more than twice as many Democrats (98,602) had returned ballots by Wednesday as Republicans (46,065) or independents (45,389).
Older voters, those 65 and up, were outpacing other age groups; 83,298 had returned their ballots. At the other end were younger voters, ages 18 to 34, who had returned 23,222 ballots. That age group has the largest number of voters (524,388) but the lowest rate of ballot return so far (4 percent).
The early returns are keeping the signature-verifiers busy. Up to 116 of the temporary, hourly-wage employees work on a weekday, split between day and night shifts.
They receive about seven hours of training before they start screening ballots, election officials said.
All mail ballots are run first through a scanning machine, which captures an image of the signature on the return envelope. The machine also verifies some of the signatures “if a high confidence match is documented,” Paes said.
The majority get sent to the verification rooms, where during an average day shift, a worker will screen about 2,000 signatures.
If they spot a mismatch, it gets sent for further review. Three or four more people may look at it, examining other signatures on file from the DMV, from petition drives, and from earlier inperson voter logs, before the ballot gets rejected, according to Paes, the assistant registrar.
In elections held prior to 2018, that might have been the end of it. But changes in state law now require counties to contact voters and provide a way to clear up discrepancies.
In San Diego County, voters receive a letter asking them to verify that they sent in the ballot in question, and asking them to provide another signature. (Depending on when the problem is found, and the fix-it letter is sent and answered, this could happen all the way up to when the results are certified, 30 days after the election.)
That process is known in election circles as “curing,” and it has shown results, according to the recent California Voter Foundation study. During the 2018 general election, in the three counties studied, about 53 percent of ballots with missing or mismatched signatures got cured and were counted.
“That’s a big leap forward, the requirement that they have to let people know if there’s a problem with a ballot,” said Romero, the political sociologist.
In the U.S., 27 other states have similar mechanisms, according to a recent New York Times story, although the landscape keeps changing because of ongoing lawsuits. Four other states do signature-matching but don’t have “curing” policies.
Once the signatures are verified in San Diego County, the envelopes get opened and the ballots removed. They can then be scanned into the counting system, ready for tallying on Election Night, when the first results get announced shortly after 8 p.m.
Because of the large number of mail ballots in this election, officials say it could take days before the outcomes in some races are known.