Spin Control: High court upholds checks of voters’ signatures on ballot envelopes

While Washington’s mail-in voting system is often criticized from the right for security that is too lax, it is not immune from challenges from the left for being too restrictive.

The state Supreme Court recently rejected a challenge to one of the pillars of mail-in voting: the verification of a voter’s signatures on the ballot envelope, performed by county elections staff before a ballot can be counted.

At issue was not whether fraudulent signatures were too easy to slip past the checkers, allowing illegally cast ballots to be counted. Rather, it was that inadequately trained checkers were rejecting the signatures from properly registered voters and valid ballots weren’t being counted.

So-called mismatched signatures are the primary reason ballots are rejected in Washington, with a total of 24,058 ballots not counted in last year’s general election for that reason. That included 1,172 ballots rejected in Spokane County, according to data on the Secretary of State’s website.

Organizations including Vets Voice Foundation and El Centro De La Raza, along with some individual voters, had challenged whether the quick decisions on validation that elections staff make – usually a matter of minutes before sending a ballot to be counted or setting it aside for further review – are enough to tell whether a signature is good. In a lower court hearing, they produced a handwriting analyst who said that a certified forensic document examiner might need an hour to verify a simple signature and up to four hours to verify a complicated one before testifying to its authenticity in court.

Voter fraud is rare, another political science expert said, and signature checking is not a reliable way to prevent it. States that don’t have a signature verification process still have few prosecutions for voter fraud .

The Secretary of State’s office, however, had its own expert who argued that what forensic document examiners do for trials and what elections staff do for ballots is “like comparing apples to oranges.” Elections staff who screen signatures don’t have the final say in rejecting the ballot, as other officials review the ballot envelope and can either approve it or put it through a “curing” process in which attempts are made to contact the voter and have them submit a document or come in to verify their signature.

The office also produced a political science expert who argued that Washington’s vote-by-mail system needs a way to verify identity and make sure no one votes more than once, and doing away with the signature verification system would leave the state without a way to prevent illegitimate votes or manipulation of the system. They might have to switch instead to another way to verify a voter’s identification that has even more drawbacks.

The right to free and equal elections is enshrined in the state constitution, Justice Steven González wrote in the unanimous decision. That doesn’t mean voters can vote multiple times on the same question or candidate, or that elections can’t be regulated and properly controlled.

Previous decisions have held regulations have to be rational, and it’s up to a challenger to prove that they aren’t. An argument that states without signature verification had low numbers of prosecutions for voter fraud isn’t convincing because prosecutors have discretion on the cases they pursue.

“We conclude that (elections officials) have shown that signature verification is narrowly tailored and designed to promote the compelling interests of election security and integrity,” the court said in ruling the process constitutional.

While ruling signature verification overall is constitutional, the court said a challenge of a specific rejection of an individual’s signature might be possible in the future, based on the facts of a particular case. Vets Voice and others had argued the system could favor voters with consistent penmanship who sign their name in a way that is easy to verify, but the evidence presented doesn’t show that inherently favors any class of voters, the court concluded.

Election security could be compromised

Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, who is ultimately in charge of elections in Washington, told a legislative committee last week that elections are secure for now. But they face a growing danger from “bad actors” like Russia and China because of announced changes, some of them later canceled or delayed, to eliminate different federal agencies charged with leading election defense.

“We have no certainty about what’s going on at the federal level,” he said.

Rep. Jim Walsh, R-Aberdeen, a committee member, questioned whether any anxiety about federal changes is not about problems arising now but something that could happen in the future.

Walsh, chairman of the state Republican Party, said his understanding from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and the administration is the changes are a way to “restructure services” to improve delivery, rather than end them. “Is it possible that she’s right?” he asked Hobbs.

“I hope you’re right,” Hobbs replied. “But that’s the whole point. You don’t know. I don’t know. And all the secretaries of state, across the United States, they don’t know … China and Russia are not going to pause while we figure out what they’re doing.”

Rep. Rob Chase, R-Spokane Valley suggested a solution would be to go back to the way Washington used to vote, at poll sites, at least temporarily.

“There was transparency. There was a paper trail. The price was right,” Chase said. “It was sort of like a Norman Rockwell rites of passage thing to be able to vote.”

When Rockwell did those paintings, Hobbs replied, the population was smaller and the country didn’t have other states trying to meddle in its elections. Washington still votes on paper ballots, with the system audited before and after the election.

“Going back to the old way is actually a whole lot more expensive,” Hobbs added.