This 1 Tiny Error Could Invalidate Your Entire Mail-In Ballot

If your signature has changed even the tiniest bit over the years, heed this warning.
Before you send off your mail-in ballot, ensure you signed the ballot envelope with a signature that matches the one you typically write. Verifying a voter’s signature on a mailed ballot is the way most states determine that you are who you say you are. Some states compare a range of signatures that you might have on file with them, while others may look at just your most recent one on file.
And it’s not necessarily the signature you used when you registered to vote.
If you’re in a jurisdiction that looks at the most recent signature, “That last signature is some interaction with the local elections official office, or maybe when you went to the DMV and updated your driver’s license … And they bring up that signature,’” explained Daniel Smith, a political scientist at the University of Florida who studies voter signature matching processes.
If your ballot signature does not match your state’s records, your ballot may get flagged for review or ultimately rejected.
Don’t panic: The vast majority of mail-in ballots do get counted. In the 2020 general election, 98.8% of them were counted and only 0.8% got rejected, according to a report from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, an independent federal agency.
Of those rejected mail-in ballots, the most common reason for rejection was mismatched signatures, at 32.8%. In the 2020 presidential election, 157,477 ballots were rejected for this reason.
“It is a small percentage of ballots, but it happens,” Ben Hovland, chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, told HuffPost. “We want it to be a smaller percentage of ballots.”
Each state and county jurisdiction may have a different way to verify your identify via signature, which is what makes the process “subjective,” Smith said.
Once your local election office receives your mail-in ballot, an automated signature verification system might do a first pass of scanning ballot signatures, and a bipartisan team or multiple reviewers may be the next layer, depending on your jurisdiction.
“That tiered review process serves jurisdictions well,” Hovland explained. The ones that get “flagged, they get reviewed to another level. And maybe that’s someone with more experience or more training” on signatures, he explained.
Adrienne Quinn Martin is the chair of the Democratic Party for Hood County, Texas, and is part of the bipartisan team that reviews signatures on mail-in ballots there. “Let’s say I say, ‘Oh, I don’t think this is the same person.’ And then my Republican [colleague], is like, ‘I don’t think so either.’ So we put that to the side, and at the end, the whole board comes together and we vote on each one of those” to decide if they are valid.
Husbands and wives will sometimes sign each other’s ballots, Martin said. Reviewers have also encountered instances in which it appears that a parent signed for their college student. Martin did note, however, that very few mail-in ballots are disqualified for these reasons: “Almost always less than 10, and usually it’s because they didn’t sign it at all.”
No two signatures from one person are exactly the same, but handwriting experts say they train election workers to break a signature down into component parts to notice major discrepancies.
Thomas Vastrick, a forensics document examiner who has consulted with election staff in Florida, said the three biggest signature areas he teaches workers to look at are signature slant, relative heights of the letters, and letter design. He said a person adding a new surname because they got married should not be a red flag, but a person who wrote their signatures previously in cursive but is now writing in a print handwriting style would be, as an example.
But of course, your signature can radically change for a number of individual reasons as well.
Smith authored 2021 research on Florida voters that found that younger voters’ ballots were more than three times as likely to be rejected for signature issues like not having a signature on the outside of their ballot or the signature not matching the one on file. Smith said that young people coming into their own identity are more likely to change their signature. Aging people and people with disabilities may also have inconsistent signatures over time.
A number of mail-ballot studies have also found that people of color are also more likely to get their ballots rejected due to signature problems, which might be due to language barriers for some ethnic groups, state auditors suggest.
Smith noted that county canvassing boards that review signatures do not see information about race, ethnicity or party on general election ballots and that elections supervisors would “forcefully reject that any implicit bias might be occurring.”
In Smith’s 2021 study, which reviewed Florida voter files, voters of color were overall 60% more likely than white voters to be initially flagged for rejection, and rejection rates for racial and ethnic minorities varied by county, suggesting this disparity might be due to “the subjectivity of who’s evaluating the signatures,” Smith said.
Voters with disabilities have rights under the Voting Rights Act and “may be given assistance by a person of the voter’s choice,” as long as it’s not their boss or an agent of that person’s union. Some jurisdictions also go one step further and offer alternate signature options for voters with disabilities. California allows voters with disabilities to provide a mark or use a signature stamp, for example.
When you do register to vote or request to vote by mail, take a picture of the signature you provide, recommended Martin.
You can contact your local elections office if you have questions about your signature, although it may be too late to update your signature in time to vote by mail for the 2024 general elections.
And when you are signing your ballot for this upcoming election, do it deliberately and consistently with how you have done it in the past. Sign your ballot “the way you would traditionally sign in a more formal setting,” Hovland said. “Don’t do the scribble that you do on the receipt or the touchpad at the store.”
Two-thirds of states are required to notify you if your signature is the reason your ballot got rejected, and they have a process for voters to “cure” the denial, which is the official election term for addressing signature mistakes in time for the ballot to be counted.
“Some states have really poorly defined procedures for this signature verification process, or they rely on only one example signature, maybe from when you first registered to vote,” said Jonathan Diaz, director of voting advocacy and partnerships at Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit that led litigation in states that did not give voters an opportunity to fix a signature problem before officials tossed the ballots.
Diaz said a cure period is necessary under the due process clause of the Constitution, because of “the risk of erroneously depriving somebody of their right to vote.”
The way an election official will notify you and how you should resolve the signature discrepancy varies by state. Typically, states will use the contact information they have on file to reach you. In Colorado, which has one of the nation’s most robust vote-by-mail processes, voters can use their mobile phones to text and resolve signature discrepancies. The National Conference of State Legislatures maintains a list of how states do signature cures if you want to look your own state up.
If your election office has not already contacted you about a ballot discrepancy, you can also check for yourself. Most states use a ballot tracking system for voters to verify if their mail-in vote ballot got mailed out, returned and counted. You can find yours here.
Keep in mind that if your ballot has a signature mismatch and is not cured in time, it will be rejected and not counted. States have different cure deadlines for addressing a missing signature or signature mismatch. Washington state gives voters 21 days after an election, while Florida has a cure deadline of only two days after Election Day.
And in some states, you might not have any recourse at all if you make a ballot mistake. At least 17 states do not have a process to cure a mail-in ballot discrepancy. Vastrick said it “bothers” him that there are still states without a cure process for signature mismatches because there are “so many reasons why a signature might get rejected and it’s legitimate.“
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Smith said vote-by-mail is “great,” but there is a tradeoff, because by mail, “your risks go up in terms of having your ballot rejected.” Your experience with voting by mail makes a difference, too. Smith said his research indicates that the more often you vote by mail, the more likely your vote-by-mail ballot will count and not be rejected because of a signature defect.
So if you plan to vote by mail or have done it already, vote early and track your ballot status.
“Submit your mail 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 advises that if you are voting in person, go early. “My recommendation is always to vote in person early because you have the most leniency in terms of making sure you go to the right polling location,” he said. “That is by far the safest way to make sure that your vote is going to count.”