Carefully check the contents of your mail-in ballot

If your signature has changed even slightly over the years, heed this warning.

Before you send your mail-in ballot, make sure the signature you sign on the ballot envelope matches the signature you usually write. Most states determine your identity by verifying a voter’s signature on a mail-in ballot. Some states will compare a series of signatures you may have on file against them, while other states may only look at your most recently filed signature.

And it doesn’t have to be the signature you used when registering to vote.

If you’re in a jurisdiction that looks at recent signatures, “the last one was some interaction with the local election official’s office, or maybe when you went to the DMV and renewed your driver’s license… they would come up with that signature,” Daniel Smith, a political scientist at the University of Florida who studies the voter signature matching process, explains.

If your ballot signature does not match your state’s records, your ballot may be flagged for review or ultimately rejected.

Don’t panic: The vast majority of mail-in ballots will be counted. In the 2020 election, 98.8% of candidates were counted and only 0.8% were rejected, according to a report by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, an independent federal agency.

Among those rejected mail-in ballots, the most common reason for rejection was signature mismatch, at 32.8%. In the 2020 presidential election, 157,477 ballots were rejected as a result.

“It’s a small percentage of the vote, but it does happen,” Ben Hovland, chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, told The Huffington Post. “We expect it to be a smaller percentage of the vote.”

Smith said each state and county jurisdiction may have different ways of verifying your identity through a signature, making the process “subjective.”

Once your local elections office receives your mail-in ballot, an automated signature verification system may perform the first scan of the ballot signature, and the next tier may be a bipartisan team or multiple auditors, depending on your jurisdiction. Jurisdiction.

“This tiered review process serves jurisdictions well,” Hovland explained. Those who are “flagged”, they are moved to another level of scrutiny. Maybe the person has more experience or more training in signing, he explained.

Adrian Quinn Martin is chairman of the Democratic Party in Hood County, Texas, and is part of a bipartisan team reviewing signatures for mail-in ballots there. “Suppose I say, ‘Oh, I don’t think it’s the same person.’ And then my Republican [colleague]it was like, “I don’t think so either.” So we put it aside, and eventually, the whole board came together and we voted on each one of them to decide whether they were valid or not.

Husbands and wives sometimes sign each other’s ballots, Martin said. Commenters have also encountered situations where parents signed autographs for college students. Martin did note, however, that very few mail-in ballots are disqualified for these reasons: “It’s almost always fewer than 10, and usually it’s because they don’t have a signature at all.”

No two signatures from one person will be exactly the same, but handwriting experts say they train election workers to break down signatures into their component parts to spot significant differences.

Thomas Vastrick, a forensic document examiner who has consulted with Florida election workers, said the three biggest signature areas he teaches staff to look out for are signature slant, Relative height of letters and letter design. He said it shouldn’t be a red flag for a person to add a new last name because they got married, but for example, a person who used to sign in cursive but now writes in a block handwriting style would.

Of course, your signature may also change radically for any number of personal reasons.

The 2021 Florida Voter Study authored by Smith found that young voters were more than three times more likely than other voters to have their ballots rejected due to signature issues, such as no signature on the outside of the ballot or a signature that did not match a signature on file. Young people are more likely to change their signatures as they come into their own, Smith said. Signatures of older people and people with disabilities may also be inconsistent over time.

Some mail-in ballot studies have also found that people of color are also more likely to be rejected due to signature problems, possibly due to language barriers for some ethnic groups, state auditors said.

Smith noted that county canvassing boards that review signatures will see no information about race, ethnicity or political party on general election ballots and that election supervisors will “vehemently deny that any implicit bias may have occurred.”

Smith’s 2021 study that examined Florida’s voter files found that overall, voters of color were 60% more likely to be flagged for rejection than white voters, while rejection rates for racial and ethnic minorities varied by county. , suggesting the discrepancy may be due to “the subjectivity of who evaluates the signatures,” Smith said.

Voters with disabilities have rights under the Voting Rights Act and “may receive assistance from a person of the voter’s choice,” as long as that person is not their boss or an agent of the person’s union. Some jurisdictions also go a step further and offer alternative signature options for voters with disabilities. California, for example, allows voters with disabilities to provide a mark or use a signature seal.

Martin recommends taking a photo of the signature you provide when you register to vote or request to vote by mail.

If you have questions about your signature, you can contact your local elections office, but it may be too late to update your signature in time to vote by mail for the 2024 election.

When you sign your ballot for the upcoming election, please proceed with caution and be consistent with what you have done in the past. “Just like how it would traditionally be signed in a more formal setting,” Hovland said. “Don’t doodle like you would on a store receipt or on a trackpad.”

Two-thirds of states are required to notify you if your signature is the reason your ballot is rejected, and they have a process for letting voters “cure” rejections, which is the official election term for resolving signature errors in time before voting is counted. .

“Some states have really unclear definitions of the signature verification process, or they rely on just a sample signature, maybe from yours,” said Jonathan Diaz, director of ballot advocacy and partnerships at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center. It starts when you first register to vote.

Diaz said the healing period is necessary under the Constitution’s due process clause because “there is a risk that someone’s right to vote will be wrongly taken away.”

How election officials notify you and how you should resolve signature differences varies by state. Typically, states will use the contact information they have on file to contact you. Colorado has one of the best mail-in voting processes in the country, allowing voters to use their phones to send text messages and resolve signature discrepancies. If you want to look up your state, the National Conference of State Legislatures keeps a list of how states have implemented signature treatments.

If your elections office hasn’t contacted you about the ballot discrepancy, you can also check it yourself. Most states use ballot tracking systems that allow voters to verify that their mail-in ballots have been mailed, returned and counted. You can find yours here.

Remember, if your ballot signature does not match and is not fixed in a timely manner, it will be rejected and not counted. States have different repair deadlines for fixing missing or mismatched signatures. Washington state gives voters 21 days after the election, while Florida’s cure period is just two days after Election Day.

In some states, if you vote incorrectly, you may have no recourse at all. At least 17 states have no process for resolving mail-in ballot discrepancies. Vastrick said it “troubled” him that there are still states that don’t have a process for resolving signature mismatches because “there are many reasons why a signature could be rejected, but the signature is legitimate.”

Voting by mail is “great,” Smith said, but there are trade-offs because by mail, “the risk of your ballot being rejected increases.” Your experience voting by mail also makes a difference. Smith said his research shows that the more times you vote by mail, the more likely your mail-in ballot is to be counted and not rejected because of a signature defect.

So if you plan to vote by mail or have already done so, please vote early and track the status of your ballot.

“Submit your mail-in ballot early so that if there are any issues, if election officials have any questions or concerns, you have time to resolve any technical issues with your ballot before Election Day,” Diaz said.

Smith also recommends that if you’re voting in person, go as early as possible. “My advice is always to vote in person as early as possible because you have the most tolerance when it comes to making sure you go to the right polling place,” he said. “That’s by far the safest way to make sure your vote counts.”