San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Mail ballots’ haphazard signatures spell trouble
Californians’ handwriting is getting worse and it’s causing increasing problems for election officials.
More than 14,000 mail ballots were rejected in the March 3 primary because the signature on the votebymail envelope didn’t match the one on the voter registration card. Thousands more were counted only after voters were required to provide a new signature for scrutiny.
For voters in their
60s, the signature they put on that ballot envelope might be compared to the one they signed when they registered to vote at age 18. For younger voters, that comparison could be with an electronic signature they never really use, having replaced it in daytoday transactions with a squiggle on a touch pad or just the tap of a phone or an Apple watch.
“The quality of signatures we get is a real concern,” said Jim Irizarry, assistant elections
“The quality of signatures we get is a real concern.” Jim Irizarry, San Mateo County assistant elections officer
officer for San Mateo County. “Electronic signatures are also one of our biggest challenges.”
A survey released last week by Secretary of State Alex Padilla found that 102,000 mail ballots were never counted in March for a variety of reasons. While ballots arriving late or postmarked after election day made up 70% of the rejections, mismatched signatures were the secondhighest reason mail votes were not tallied.
Although that’s not a huge percentage of the more than 7 million mail ballots cast in the primary, it’s still an embarrassment to a state where the 2018 law that set many of California’s newest voting rules was titled the “Every Vote Counts Act.”
A Stanford Law School case study on signature verification and mail ballots, released in May, found that procedures for checking signatures vary from county to county. While state law bars a ballot from being rejected for mismatched signatures without an election official signing off, counties come to that final decision in different ways.
“There’s no set standard,” said Tom Westphal, a lead author of the study. “Each county has developed their own protocols.”
The secretary of state’s office is “in the process of creating updated regulations on signature verification,” a spokesman said, but that hasn’t happened yet.
“There’s a lot of criteria we look at,” said Evelyn Mendez, a spokeswoman for the Santa Clara County registrar of voters. “It’s not one look and if it doesn’t match it’s rejected.”
Those differing standards mean rejection rates vary dramatically between counties. In March, Los Ange
“There’s a lot of criteria we look at. It’s not one look and if it doesn’t match it’s rejected.”
Evelyn Mendez, Santa Clara County registrar of voters spokeswoman
les County, with 1.1 million mail ballots, rejected 267 for mismatched signatures. San Mateo County, with just under 200,000 mail ballots, eliminated 1,169. It was a similar story in Sonoma County, which rejected 969 of its 154,000 mail ballots for bad signatures.
The number of rejections “means we’re doing our job. We’re not rejecting signatures whimsically,” said Irizarry of San Mateo County. “We’re doing as good a job as anyone in the state.”
The county looks at the signatures in “a very straightforward manner,” he added, with at least five steps involving different people checking before deciding the signatures don’t match.
For many years, that final review was the end of it. If election officials rejected the ballot, it wasn’t counted and the voter wasn’t notified.
But in 2018, Peter La Follette of Sonoma County, joined by the American Civil Liberties Union, sued the secretary of state, arguing that he should have been given a chance to fix his mismatched signature before his mail ballot was rejected in the 2016 presidential election. A San Francisco judge agreed, saying the state and its counties had to allow ballot fixes.
Those “cure” notices, which let voters fix their signature problems with a postcard, haven’t solved all the woes. About half the voters who received the letters, emails and phone calls in San Francisco in the March primary fixed their problem, while in San Mateo County only about 142 of the more than 2,000 voters with unsigned ballots or mismatched signatures replied.
“We really didn’t have that many responses,” Irizarry said.
The signature problem is only going to get worse in November, when mail ballots will go out to every active voter in the state. The huge anticipated turnout, most of it coming by mail, is likely to include many young voters, a group that has the highest percentage of rejected ballots.
In the Stanford study, election officials complained that many young people never learned or don’t use cursive writing, which doesn’t make matching signatures easier.
“I cannot compare a printed name to a signature,” said an anonymous official quoted in the study.
Then there are the electronic signatures, many of them written on a touch pad with a stylus or even a finger. While the Department of Motor Vehicles’ touch pads were updated in 2016 to make it easier for people to sign their name and standardize the size of the signature, they still can be very different from a “wet” signature on paper.
Since online voter registrations rely on that signature in the DMV records, there now are 2.8 million active voter records with only that electronic signature. The number is growing each year.
A number of counties are reaching beyond that signature on the registration card or DMV computer file. San Francisco, for example, uses copies of signatures from earlier votebymail envelopes and other signed state and local documents to give election workers more examples for comparison, said John Arntz, the city’s elections director.
Since everyone’s signature changes over the years, using a variety of documents allows election officials “to look across time” in an effort to make the matches, said Westphal of the Stanford study.