The Grand Illusion
Last week, when I was watching a news story on the results of the election, a particular news item caught my attention – that a number of ballots cast by young people in Nevada were being scrutinized because the signatures on the ballot didn’t match the signatures on file.
Fraud, you might ask. Apparently not.
The signature on the mail-in ballot or in some states on the voting register has to match the signature on file, and that is noted on the ballot, and the signature on file has to match the name on whatever legal document was used to register.
That’s true here in Utah as well, so while my friends know me as Lee Modesitt, and I write under L.E. Modesitt, Jr., the signature on my mail-in ballot has to be my full legal name – Leland Exton Modesitt, Jr. Otherwise, the ballot will be questioned, and possibly thrown out, or I might have to prove to the County Clerk that I’m the one who cast the ballot.
This is spelled out clearly, but the ballots of more than a few ballots of young voters in Nevada were being scrutinized for inadequate signature matches, according to the news.
I’m hardly surprised. Too many of my wife’s college students don’t read the syllabus (and often don’t listen to the same information imparted orally), and then protest that they didn’t know an assignment was due or that a test was scheduled for a given date. So it’s not exactly shocking that some young voters didn’t read the ballot instructions, either.
I have a sort of Oprah Winfrey signature I do when I’m in a rush, and another one I do when I feel I have more time. They’re actually quite different looking. I had to take a moment with my mail-in ballot to check my ID to see which one I’d signed with.
I feel like the youth are going to be forced to learn some hard lessons from life since we’ve collectively failed to teach them ourselves. I hope they’re able to recover when reality hits.
Probably the very few times many young people actually ‘sign’ their name is using a digital signature screen for a credit or debit card. And we all know that’s a crap representation as one usually uses a finger to scrawl something on a too-tiny screen.
Even when they have you use a stylus, for various reasons (not a wide, flat surface, different texture), it still isn’t anywhere close to what normal writing is like
Additionally, the only times I have to sign my full name are when voting or buying/selling property. That means I’m out of practice doing it, and causes a lot of variations. Muscle memory also causes problems, as the flow of the signature will stop after “Chris” before I finish writing the last part of my first name. Depending on how I stop it can cause a notable difference between signatures.
I really wish we could find a viable replacement for physical signatures, but none of the alternatives work out very well. In person voting is an issue for a lot of people (disabilities, lack of transportation, insufficient staffing of polling locations), and digital voting is too open to hacking and properly securing it (a little USB fob) would too frequently result in lost credentials.
The more I type, the less I write, the worse my handwriting and signature.
The tenability of signatures as a means of identification seems to me to be in question in this modern age where copying signatures, varying them using deep learning, and people hardly ever write by hand.
An alternative could be the type of electronic signing used by PGP, and used IIRC in Estonia for electronic voting… but that requires computer literacy, which is stretch when half of the US has the literacy of a 6th grader.
We have mail in voting as our only option in Oregon. Yes, we have to sign the outer envelope, but I’m assuming that just makes everyone feel better. I’m not sure if signature matching is actually done for all returned ballots or only in cases of disputed outcomes. I wouldn’t trust individual support staffers to be suitable for that kind of expertise in any case. We’ve now been fighting for a few election cycles fiercely about supposed voters fraud. When it has been proven to happen it has actually been a Trump supporter most times. Or Mark Meadows. But he wasn’t prosecuted for that in NC. It seems that this provision in many states really is pretty useless.
Interesting data:
https://thisisreno.com/2024/11/9000-nevada-ballots-went-uncounted-this-year-due-to-signature-issues/
Supported by:
https://www.nvsos.gov/sos/home/showpublisheddocument/15559/638670995452675525
So reading and precision or a matter of caring?
Oh, just let an AI check the matches. What could go wrong?
Not to mention that signature changes happen through time.
A few years ago, I found an old travellers check from a decade or so previous that I’d not cashed in while on a trip – it was emergency money that I was thankful not to need. On my parents’ recommendation I’d kept the check rather than cashing it in on returning home – thinking we were likely to do more travel in the future.
When I found it, I nearly couldn’t cash it in because my signature had changed so much from that of my younger self.
Yeah was going to say I remember writing several pages of signatures while I was figuring out my “style”, and I think very few of them actually matched.
There was a clear theme, but consistency has never been a strong point.
Heck, nowadays I can sign off on pages of scopes, and even my initials don’t tend to match. Close enough, but probably not for scrutineers.
Given how terrible the signature pads are at the DMV here in NY, I rather suspect the reasons for signature match failure are more diverse than “those lazy, entitled millennials”.
I know the signature on my license looks like some sort of cursed incantation the words of which were never meant to be uttered by mortals, and that’s all the fault of the signature pads being scratched and worn out. I couldn’t recreate it if I tried.
I also know that if you looked at my signature on something I signed at 16 or 18, and compared it to something I signed a few months later — after having signed off on the fifty bazillion documents they made us sign in order to go off to college — no signature match program would ever say they were the same. I see the same effect when I hand over a stack of docs for the guys at work to sign: the signatures at the bottom of the stack are very not the same as the ones at the top.
Signatures do indeed change over time. In the 11 year span between my first driver’s license and my first mortgage I, without noticing, altered my signature so much that I had to sign a legal document stating that both variations of my signature (printed on document from public records) were in fact mine.
As for precise reading… what a joy that has been! Contrary to the norm, I am a mechanical engineer whom is bad at mathematics and excellent at reading. I have found that few professionals read much of anything after college. Why?! How can you stay current with the latest technology or expand your understanding of a subject of you don’t read? As my mentor says, the greatest human sin isn’t that we burn books, it’s that nobody reads them!