South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Sloppy signatures, late ballots perils of voting by mail
More and more voters are taking advantage of voting by mail — and getting a surprise from the close 2018 midterm elections that resulted in three statewide recounts in Florida.
The truth — long known to political insiders — is that vote-by-mail ballots have a significantly
they’ll benefit — and anger from citizens who are discovering their votes don’t count.
Problems with mail ballots have emerged as a major battleground in Florida’s recount fight. In the closely watched race of U.S. Senate, incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson trails his Republican challenger Gov. Rick Scott by about 12,600 votes.
More than 3,600 mail ballots cast in the Nov. 6 election weren’t counted because of mismatched signatures, according to an incomplete breakdown released in federal court. That tally does not include some of the state’s largest counties, including Miami-Dade County.
U.S. District Judge Mark Walker ordered Thursday that Florida voters whose ballots weren’t counted because of signature mismatches got extra time — until 5 p.m. Saturday — to solve the issues. That could help Nelson and other Democrats gain more votes.
Affected voters
Jan Lipinski, of Pompano Beach, used mail voting this year for the first time. Rather than using the mail, she used a Broward Supervisor of Elections Office dropoff site and delivered her ballot to the early voting site at the Coral Ridge Mall in Fort Lauderdale on Oct. 31.
As controversy heightened in recent days over the close midterm elections, she checked the status of her ballot online — and learned it wasn’t tabulated because of a signature issue.
“First, I was just completely, 100 percent shocked,” she said. Now, she said, “I’m angry.”
Lipinski, a real estate paralegal, said she’ll never vote by mail again.
Valerie Burks said mail voting seemed ideal for her two adult sons. “There was no way I was going to get them to the polls,” she said.
Their ballots were mailed, one from Coral Springs and the other from West Palm Beach, to the Broward Supervisor of Elections Office, on Oct. 30.
After repeatedly checking the Elections Office website, she discovered the ballots were received too late — after 7 p.m. on Election Day, Nov. 6 — and weren’t counted.
“I was just livid,” she said. “I was very angry.”
Burks, a Coral Springs resident who teaches political science at Broward College, said she is now a skeptic about voting by mail. “I don’t trust it at all. I can’t advocate anybody doing it.”
Even political pros aren’t immune. Former U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy, a Democrat who represented northern Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie counties, said in an affidavit filed in connection with an election lawsuit that he found out his ballot was rejected because of an invalid signature.
Problems
A September study found that mail ballots in Florida were more likely to experience problems than other voting methods.
The study was conducted by Daniel Smith, chairman of the political science department at the University of Florida and one of the nation’s leading experts on voting and election administration. He produced the report for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.
Smith’s study found that 1 percent of Florida’s mailin ballots cast in the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections — that’s one out of every 100 mail ballots — weren’t counted. That amounted to 28,000 ballots in the last presidential election.
Younger voters and minority voters were significantly more likely to have their ballots disqualified than older and white voters, and less likely to have their mail ballot problems corrected when flagged for a signature problem, Smith found.
Rick Hasen, an election law expert at University of
California, Irvine, said the problem may get worse. “As people use computers more and write less their handwriting tends to be inconsistent over time. Handwriting analysis itself is certainly not an exact science."
Rules
Ballots get flagged — and not counted — if a voter’s signature on the mail ballot doesn’t match the signature on file with the person’s voter registration. The problem: people’s signatures change over time or they use or omit a middle initial or start using a nickname.
Also, Florida has a strict deadline for mail ballots. Except for overseas and military ballots, mail votes must all be in the county supervisor of elections office by the time the polls close on Election Day. In Florida, postmarks don’t count.
Elections officials in South Florida said this week they didn’t have detailed numbers about the number of ballots that weren’t counted because of signature issues. During a federal court appearance Wednesday afternoon, the state reported it knew of 3,688 ballots rejected because of mismatched signatures, but its figures weren’t comprehensive.
That list included 165 ballots in Broward County and 931 in Palm Beach County.
Local officials also said they didn’t have tallies of how many ballots came after the 7 p.m. deadline on Nov. 6.
Lawsuits
Multiple lawsuits have been filed about ballot counting in Florida.
Nelson, whose vote totals have been behind Scott since election night, wants Florida’s mail ballot rules thrown out by federal courts, hoping that allowing counting of some of those votes as his contest is recounted could produce a different outcome.
A major target for Democrats is the signature requirement, with some going as far as mocking the rule. State Sen. Gary Farmer, a Broward Democrat, sarcastically reported “breaking news” on Twitter Monday evening: “My credit card receipt signature for dinner tonight does not match my signature when I registered to vote in 1982!”
Marc Elias, Nelson’s lead recount lawyer, argues the rule requiring matching signatures isn’t fair. He said the signature rule doesn’t deter fraud and argues it does disenfranchise voters.
But James A. Gardner, a specialist in election law at the University at Buffalo, said the rules are in place for good reason: to prevent fraud. Studies have shown that absentee ballot fraud is much more likely than fraud during in-person voting on Election Day.
"If there are two signatures that clearly differ, it suggests the possibility of voter impersonation," he said.
Elias also asserted that
“the people doing the signature matching, they are not experts in handwriting. They are not experts in signatures. They have actually not received any training in signatures and handwriting.”
That’s not accurate. Suzy Trutie, a Miami-Dade County deputy supervisor of elections, said by email that people who work on signature verification in her county receive training from a certified signature specialist. After the fourhour training, workers must pass an exam. Before past elections, Broward Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes has regularly had her staff trained in handwriting analysis.
Linton A. Mohammed, a forensic document examiner, filed an affidavit with the court on behalf of the Nelson campaign, stating far more training is needed
for election workers to adequately evaluate signatures. Without more training, election workers would likely have higher error rates, deeming authentic signatures to be inauthentic, he said.
"Even highly trained forensic document examiners who operate under strict standards may err when reviewing signatures," he said.
Elias has also said the deadline to get ballots to the county supervisor of elections — 7 p.m. on Election Day — isn’t fair.
“The mail sometimes is very fast. The mail sometimes is very slow under normal circumstances. Someone may put a ballot in the mail and it arrives within 24 hours, or it arrives two weeks later,” he said. He said people shouldn’t lose their vote based on the speed of the
Postal Service.
And, he said, it’s unfair because overseas and military ballots get an extra 10 days as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day. The different treatment is unfair, he said.
Ballot fraud
Florida has experienced fraud with use of mail-in ballots.
The state changed the law starting with 2014 elections to prohibit campaigns from paying people to collect ballots and return them to county elections offices. The prohibition was aimed largely at Miami-Dade County’s boleteros, a Spanish term for people who collect absentee ballots. They had been linked to fraudulent ballots.
In Palm Beach County, the State Attorney's Office investigated allegations of mail-in voter fraud in the
2016 primary. Investigators determined that 21 mail-in ballot request forms had been forged, but prosecutors did not pursue charges, noting in a June
2017 memo “there was not enough evidence to name a suspect.”
A Palm Beach Post investigative report detailed how candidates or campaign workers had entered voters' homes and told them who to vote for — sometimes standing over their shoulders as they filled out the ballot.
Surge in popularity
Political parties have been pushing mail voting for several election cycles. Parties and candidates like to have their supporters cast ballots before Election Day, so they can better manage their get out the vote efforts.
Elections officials have touted mail voting as a way to alleviate long lines that affect early voting sites and some Election Day polling stations in high-turnout elections.
And voters increasingly like the convenience. In this year’s midterms, 2.6 million Florida votes were cast by mail, up from 1.9 million in 2014. More people voted in 2018 than in the last midterm, so the total share of early votes, about 31.5 percent, was the same.
Records show Lori Green, of Weston, has voted by mail in 10 of the last 12 elections, including this year’s midterm.
Her ballot was tabulated, but now that the physical education teacher knows the potential pitfalls she doesn’t plan to vote by mail in the future. “I’m not going to do it again. I don’t feel comfortable.”