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If we don't have a meaningful signature match, than we don't have a meaningful way to prevent fraud with mail in ballots. Period. Bad ballot Rejection rate of

If we don't have a meaningful signature match, than we don't have a meaningful way to prevent fraud with mail in ballots. Period. Bad ballot Rejection rate of 6% in previous election to now 0.02%, with mail in ballots. Mismatched signatures resulted in a rejection for only 0.02% of all absentee ballots cast. How is that even possible. They counted almost everything. For those of you that think its unfair to reject ballots. Well how do you verify that the person cast the ballot is the one that sent it in?

jaccarmac 6y ago
> If we don't have a meaningful signature match, than we don't have a meaningful way to prevent fraud with mail in ballots. Period. We can check for duplicate votes. Submitting fraudulent ballots in quantities necessary to change the results while avoiding submitting duplicate ballots (which would be caught, as we saw with the Jill Stokke) would require either: 1. Extremely good data about who had voted and who had not. OR 2. Some faction in the ballot-processing chain with the ability to secretly discard the legitimate ballots. Is there evidence that either of these things happened?
- dilap 6y ago
  I don't think it's that hard if you harvest ballots from places unlikely to vote, e.g., nursing homes. My understanding is the following two facts are true - Georgia has a historically low mail-in ballot rejection rate - Georgia is not allowing an independent review of the signatures on the envelopes That alone in my mind is an extremely strong reason to be suspicious of the results. Not to even mention the very-strange goings-on in the State Farm Arena in Atlanta...
  - VikingCoder 6y ago
    There were 22,894 nursing facility residents in Georgia in 2019. [1] How many of them do you think had their ballots harvested? I think it's far harder to harvest ballots without getting caught than you seem to think it is. [1] : https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/number-of-nursing-facility-residents/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/number-of-nursing-...
    - dilap 6y ago
      Sure, you might be right. I wouldn't say I'm confident it would be easy or confident it would be hard.
      - VikingCoder 6y ago
        Let's say that you brought in signature experts to look for fraudulent ballots, based on detecting forged signatures. What do you think their false positive / false negative rates would look like?
        dilap 6y ago
        Beats me; given the historically low rate & the allegations of fraud, it seems to be you should do the review so that everyone can be confident in the results (in the event there was not significant fraud) or so that the fraud can be exposed (in the event there was). One data point is in Arizona where the judge allowed 100 randomly-sampled envelopes to be reviewed for a signature, the democratic expert witness said 16 of them were inconclusive. However, the Judge ruled that that was not evidence of fraud. I'm not really sure how exactly you can conclude that, and the fact that we are apprently counting votes in AZ with signatures that don't match certainly doesn't make me particularly confident in the results. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/12/04/arizona-judge-rejects-republican-effort-overturn-state-election-results/3821578001/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020...
        nl 6y ago
        The whole point is that signature verification isn't a reliable indicator of fraud or anything. It never has been, and should never have been relied on. The ballots and the envelopes and the protection of them is the key.
        dilap 6y ago
        In that case, what protects against fraud? Anything? I personally know of two ballots, not mine, that I could have filled and out returned, if I'd been so inclined. (People in apartment buildings I have access to who have moved out of state, but still got sent ballots, which were just setting in the foyer; I'm sure there are gazillions of other ways to get ballots.) If you're not even going to require the signatures to match, it seems like committing vote fraud would be ridiculously easy. (Of course, if you really want to have a secure election, make people vote in person and have a continuous chain of custody of those votes; use the ink-on-your-finger trick to prevent double-voting.)
- rightbyte 6y ago
  You can vote on election day even though you sent a mail in ballot earlier right? They just destroy the mailed in one.
  - graywh 6y ago
    I think in most cases, your in-person vote in that situation is provisional -- meaning it will only count if your mail-in vote doesn't arrive
    - jaccarmac 6y ago
      Jill Stokke was explicitly given the option to have her mail-in vote invalidated so she could vote in person. That was in Nevada; Procedures elsewhere may be different.
  - jaccarmac 6y ago
    That is correct, and is precisely what happened with Stokke. Stokke came to the polling place was told that her mail-in ballot had already been received. She was given the choice to sign an affadavit claiming that she had not voted by mail, which would allow her to vote in person. She refused to sign the affadavit and then began to peddle her story as evidence of fraud. Really makes you think...
  - codys 6y ago
    This is state dependent. In some states, voting in person after sending a mail in ballot is a felony.
- dukeofdoom 6y ago
  >Some faction in the ballot-processing chain with the >ability to secretly discard the legitimate ballots. This video does not instil confidence that 2 did not happen. Dominion Voting Machine Flaws -- 2020 Election Coffee County, Georgia Video 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46CAKyyObls&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46CAKyyObls&feature=emb_titl...
  - jaccarmac 6y ago
    Didn't Georgia do a hand recount? The video seems to show the process of scanning the ballots, not a way that massive numbers of physical ballots could be discarded.
  - jaccarmac 6y ago
    After watching the video more closely, I have no idea what the point is. Overvoting causes the ballot to go to adjudication. At that point the person adjudicating gets to choose which results are submitted and tabulated. Is that supposed to be evidence of fraud? That's exactly what I expect from adjudication: A human has to read the ballot and choose whether to disambiguate it or remove it from the tabulation. Not to mention the physical ballots are not changed. Unless the same person adjudicates the same ballots the same way, this kind of tampering is incredibly easy to catch.
DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
> How is that even possible. It's not true. This is a myth that's been spreading online about Georgia absentee ballots. Long story short: * The 6% number from 2016 comes from taking into account ballots that arrived late. * The 0.02% number from 2020 is actually 0.2%, and only takes into account ballots that arrived on time. The signature rejection rate in 2020 was actually very similar to the rates in 2018 and 2016. So as usual, these claims are simply bogus. But even if there were problems with the signature matching system, the time to raise objections would have been before the election. Attempting to throw out millions of ballots after the election over these issues is absurd and anti-democratic. 1. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-georgia-rejected-ballots-fo-idUSKBN2832CM https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-georgia-rejecte...
- dukeofdoom 6y ago
  >The time to raise objections would have been before the >election. Trump lawyers did try to prevent these election changes, by taking them to court. The lawsuits were rejected at the time, on the basis on not being able to prove injury/damage, because no damage has occurred yet, only hypothetically. Now that the damage has occurred, they are told that they should have sued before. Thats a very sneaky/dishonest way of being treated by the courts. The fact check does not prove a lie. At most it proves that Trump is not making the statement based on publicly available data. Since the final rejection rate for 2020 have not yet been released. From the fact check: "Georgia rejected 6.42% of mail-in ballots in total in the 2016 general election " "The higher percentage he mentions for past years is likely based off the total rejected ballots (here) which can not be compared with 2020, as this information is not available."
  - DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
    The fact check shows that Trump is conflating two different numbers: the number of ballots that arrive late and the number that are rejected due to signature mismatch. If Trump has any idea what he's talking about, I'm comfortable calling that level of dishonesty a "lie." My view is that he just doesn't care what's true or not, and he probably knows that much of what he's saying is false. > Trump lawyers did try to prevent these election changes, by taking them to court. Which changes? State election laws are set by the state legislature. In Georgia, the Republicans control both houses, plus the governorship. It's hard to believe that the Republican party would have set the rules to disadvantage their own Presidential candidate.
xii22 6y ago
can you link me a source that proves that the rejection rate of 6% went down to 0.02%? thank you!
- dukeofdoom 6y ago
  These seem to be the most upto date numbers. "Rejected absentee/mail-in ballots as a percentage of total absentee/mail-in ballots returned, 2016-2020" Georgia 2016 6.42% Georgia 2020 .60% Source https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2020:_Analysis_of_rejected_ballots https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2020:_Analysis_of_... Which cites the official Georgia election website as source of the raw data.
  - jeremyjh 6y ago
    6.42% was the total rejection rate for all causes. Most ballots are rejected because they arrive late. Those are not yet included in the 2020 reject numbers. https://www.factcheck.org/2020/11/trump-misinformation-on-georgia-ballot-rejections/ https://www.factcheck.org/2020/11/trump-misinformation-on-ge...
    - dukeofdoom 6y ago
      The factcheck article is from November 20th. The Ballot tabulation website page says it has been updated December 9th (today) Its been weeks since the election, We don't even know how many votes have been cast still? This seems ridiculous. Most countries have final results on election night.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cityofdelusion 6y ago
Is there any evidence that signature matching is an accurate way to ensure correctness? As a useless anecdote, my current signature looks _nothing_ like the one on my state issued ID from 10 years ago. Something that someone else said is quite important here: the time to fix these things is before an election, not afterwards. It doesn't take much imagination to see how invalidating large quantities of ballots after-the-fact is a dangerous road for a democracy. Put the rules and methods in place prior, in a bipartisan way.
- dukeofdoom 6y ago
  The Trump team did take this to court before the election, but they were denied on the basis of the "injury" only being hypothetical at that time... So they couldn't successfully sued before, and now they are told that its too late. Something very dishonest from the courts about that. Your own personal anecdote confirms that people's signatures change overtime. Hence more should have been rejected.
  - sjwright 6y ago
    Relying on—and rejecting votes using—a poor method of voter identification is voter suppression. A signature shouldn't be used for identification matching but rather as akin to the signing of an affidavit.
    - dukeofdoom 6y ago
      Accepting votes that do not have matching signatures, is diluting the votes that do have matching signatures. Why should a person that voted in person, in a more secure way, have their votes diluted by a mailed in ballot that does not meet a minimum standard of security, and consequently are much more likely to be fraudulent. 1. Signature match is the minimum filter to prevent outright fake ballots. 2. I believe there was a procedure for rectifying a rejected mail-in ballot. The person still could have voted, if they sent in their ballot on time, and rectified any mistakes. 3. Mail-in ballots are really an assault on the right to a "secret ballot". There really is no guarantee that the mail-in ballot was filled out in secret. An abusive husband could for example coarse his wife to vote a certain way. A union boss, could coarse his workers to vote a certain way...and so on. This has happened in the past.
forgingahead 6y ago
You're right. It was interesting to learn that Obama won his first election in Chicago by getting his opponents disqualified due to signature issues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois_Senate_elections_of_Barack_Obama#Nominating_petition_challenges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois_Senate_elections_of_B... https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2007-04-04-0704030881-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2007-04-04-070403...
nl 6y ago
> If we don't have a meaningful signature match, than we don't have a meaningful way to prevent fraud with mail in ballots. Period. This isn't true at all. We've had mail-in voting in Australia for decades, and there is no signature matching. Some US states do use it at all. Signature verification is error prone and becoming more-so as less people use their signatures regularly. > Bad ballot Rejection rate of 6% in previous election to now 0.02%, with mail in ballots. Wikipedia says in the 2016 election 1% of mail ballots were rejected[1]. I'd expect that to be a lot less this year because of the increased emphasis on it and the much higher numbers, but I haven't verified your 0.02% number. But going from 1% to 0.02% shouldn't be surprising based on the completely different voting behavior this year. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_voting_in_the_United_States#Reliability_of_postal_ballots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_voting_in_the_United_St...
- dukeofdoom 6y ago
  Can you expend on how the process works in Australia. Genuinely curious. The 0.02% or the more recent 0.06% rejection rate is very low. Think of it this way. Out of 1000 people taking a test that needed two signatures, that matched. Only 2-6 did not not match. Thats an extremely low number. This is why teachers are always reminding students not to forget to sign their test, in a class of 30, and that only requires one signature. If you worked with the general public, and you asked them to tie their shoes, I honestly believe you would have a higher failure rate than 0.02%
  - nl 6y ago
    > Out of 1000 people taking a test that needed two signatures, that matched. Only 2-6 did not not match. Thats an extremely low number. No that's not what it means. It means 2-6 were rejected. "Signature matching" is a junk process and should be ignored. In the AZ random sampling that the Judge asked for, 6/100 signatures were inconclusive, and this was on verified voters. > Can you expend on how the process works in Australia. Genuinely curious. https://www.aec.gov.au/faqs/postal-voting.htm https://www.aec.gov.au/faqs/postal-voting.htm You control the voting envelopes and ballot papers which is actually how fraud is controlled in the US too. The signature verification thing is nothing but ineffective security theatre.
codys 6y ago
As others have noted, the statistics you listed are recklessly inaccurate. That said: even if they were accurate, we'd still need to examine how may signature match failures result in detecting actual fraudulent voting, and how many signature match failures don't (ie they are false positives that serve to disenfranchise voters). It turns out that the vast majority (97%) of ballots rejected due to signature match issues are likely valid. IOW: we'd disenfranchise 32 people for every case of fraud occurring. I have personal doubts that the rate for fraud was even that high (3% of the % of ballots rejected for sig mismatch), as you'd expect some type of criminal charges resulting from it. Even assuming the 3% of sig rejects number, because that's already a % of sig rejects, it comes out to 3% of 0.2% (the actual number of sig mismatch rejections). This is 0.006% of the total vote. Additionally, signature match checking disproportionately rejects votes from specific groups, while accepting votes from other groups. In other words, having a signature check (or making it "stricter") allows tuning which demographics you accept votes from. Allowing this type of targeted disenfranchisement is not good
- dukeofdoom 6y ago
  Banks not accepting monopoly money also disenfranchises poor people. If banks did start accepting monopoly money, real money would become worth less. Having even a basic standard of verifiability and security is where the worth of money comes from. Also rights come with responsibilities. If you can't sing your signature in a consistent way, than maybe you should not vote by mail in ballot. Vote in person. Most up to date stats on the rejection rates that I found. 0.6% vs 6.4% in Georgia. https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2020:_Analysis_of_rejected_ballots https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2020:_Analysis_of_...
  - codys 6y ago
    Others have previously responded to you reposting this link with this commentary, noting that the numbers included there are the result of a tabulating error. Continuing to attempt to use it to push misinformation after being informed is not acceptable.
    - 6y ago

jaccarmac 6y ago

> If we don't have a meaningful signature match, than we don't have a meaningful way to prevent fraud with mail in ballots. Period. We can check for duplicate votes. Submitting fraudulent ballots in quantities necessary to change the results while avoiding submitting duplicate ballots (which would be caught, as we saw with the Jill Stokke) would require either: 1. Extremely good data about who had voted and who had not. OR 2. Some faction in the ballot-processing chain with the ability to secretly discard the legitimate ballots. Is there evidence that either of these things happened?

dilap 6y ago
I don't think it's that hard if you harvest ballots from places unlikely to vote, e.g., nursing homes. My understanding is the following two facts are true - Georgia has a historically low mail-in ballot rejection rate - Georgia is not allowing an independent review of the signatures on the envelopes That alone in my mind is an extremely strong reason to be suspicious of the results. Not to even mention the very-strange goings-on in the State Farm Arena in Atlanta...
- VikingCoder 6y ago
  There were 22,894 nursing facility residents in Georgia in 2019. [1] How many of them do you think had their ballots harvested? I think it's far harder to harvest ballots without getting caught than you seem to think it is. [1] : https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/number-of-nursing-facility-residents/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/number-of-nursing-...
  - dilap 6y ago
    Sure, you might be right. I wouldn't say I'm confident it would be easy or confident it would be hard.
    - VikingCoder 6y ago
      Let's say that you brought in signature experts to look for fraudulent ballots, based on detecting forged signatures. What do you think their false positive / false negative rates would look like?
      - dilap 6y ago
        Beats me; given the historically low rate & the allegations of fraud, it seems to be you should do the review so that everyone can be confident in the results (in the event there was not significant fraud) or so that the fraud can be exposed (in the event there was). One data point is in Arizona where the judge allowed 100 randomly-sampled envelopes to be reviewed for a signature, the democratic expert witness said 16 of them were inconclusive. However, the Judge ruled that that was not evidence of fraud. I'm not really sure how exactly you can conclude that, and the fact that we are apprently counting votes in AZ with signatures that don't match certainly doesn't make me particularly confident in the results. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/12/04/arizona-judge-rejects-republican-effort-overturn-state-election-results/3821578001/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020...
        nl 6y ago
        The whole point is that signature verification isn't a reliable indicator of fraud or anything. It never has been, and should never have been relied on. The ballots and the envelopes and the protection of them is the key.
        dilap 6y ago
        In that case, what protects against fraud? Anything? I personally know of two ballots, not mine, that I could have filled and out returned, if I'd been so inclined. (People in apartment buildings I have access to who have moved out of state, but still got sent ballots, which were just setting in the foyer; I'm sure there are gazillions of other ways to get ballots.) If you're not even going to require the signatures to match, it seems like committing vote fraud would be ridiculously easy. (Of course, if you really want to have a secure election, make people vote in person and have a continuous chain of custody of those votes; use the ink-on-your-finger trick to prevent double-voting.)
rightbyte 6y ago
You can vote on election day even though you sent a mail in ballot earlier right? They just destroy the mailed in one.
- graywh 6y ago
  I think in most cases, your in-person vote in that situation is provisional -- meaning it will only count if your mail-in vote doesn't arrive
  - jaccarmac 6y ago
    Jill Stokke was explicitly given the option to have her mail-in vote invalidated so she could vote in person. That was in Nevada; Procedures elsewhere may be different.
- jaccarmac 6y ago
  That is correct, and is precisely what happened with Stokke. Stokke came to the polling place was told that her mail-in ballot had already been received. She was given the choice to sign an affadavit claiming that she had not voted by mail, which would allow her to vote in person. She refused to sign the affadavit and then began to peddle her story as evidence of fraud. Really makes you think...
- codys 6y ago
  This is state dependent. In some states, voting in person after sending a mail in ballot is a felony.
dukeofdoom 6y ago
>Some faction in the ballot-processing chain with the >ability to secretly discard the legitimate ballots. This video does not instil confidence that 2 did not happen. Dominion Voting Machine Flaws -- 2020 Election Coffee County, Georgia Video 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46CAKyyObls&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46CAKyyObls&feature=emb_titl...
- jaccarmac 6y ago
  Didn't Georgia do a hand recount? The video seems to show the process of scanning the ballots, not a way that massive numbers of physical ballots could be discarded.
- jaccarmac 6y ago
  After watching the video more closely, I have no idea what the point is. Overvoting causes the ballot to go to adjudication. At that point the person adjudicating gets to choose which results are submitted and tabulated. Is that supposed to be evidence of fraud? That's exactly what I expect from adjudication: A human has to read the ballot and choose whether to disambiguate it or remove it from the tabulation. Not to mention the physical ballots are not changed. Unless the same person adjudicates the same ballots the same way, this kind of tampering is incredibly easy to catch.

DiogenesKynikos 6y ago

> How is that even possible. It's not true. This is a myth that's been spreading online about Georgia absentee ballots. Long story short: * The 6% number from 2016 comes from taking into account ballots that arrived late. * The 0.02% number from 2020 is actually 0.2%, and only takes into account ballots that arrived on time. The signature rejection rate in 2020 was actually very similar to the rates in 2018 and 2016. So as usual, these claims are simply bogus. But even if there were problems with the signature matching system, the time to raise objections would have been before the election. Attempting to throw out millions of ballots after the election over these issues is absurd and anti-democratic. 1. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-georgia-rejected-ballots-fo-idUSKBN2832CM https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-georgia-rejecte...

dukeofdoom 6y ago
>The time to raise objections would have been before the >election. Trump lawyers did try to prevent these election changes, by taking them to court. The lawsuits were rejected at the time, on the basis on not being able to prove injury/damage, because no damage has occurred yet, only hypothetically. Now that the damage has occurred, they are told that they should have sued before. Thats a very sneaky/dishonest way of being treated by the courts. The fact check does not prove a lie. At most it proves that Trump is not making the statement based on publicly available data. Since the final rejection rate for 2020 have not yet been released. From the fact check: "Georgia rejected 6.42% of mail-in ballots in total in the 2016 general election " "The higher percentage he mentions for past years is likely based off the total rejected ballots (here) which can not be compared with 2020, as this information is not available."
- DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
  The fact check shows that Trump is conflating two different numbers: the number of ballots that arrive late and the number that are rejected due to signature mismatch. If Trump has any idea what he's talking about, I'm comfortable calling that level of dishonesty a "lie." My view is that he just doesn't care what's true or not, and he probably knows that much of what he's saying is false. > Trump lawyers did try to prevent these election changes, by taking them to court. Which changes? State election laws are set by the state legislature. In Georgia, the Republicans control both houses, plus the governorship. It's hard to believe that the Republican party would have set the rules to disadvantage their own Presidential candidate.

xii22 6y ago

can you link me a source that proves that the rejection rate of 6% went down to 0.02%? thank you!

dukeofdoom 6y ago
These seem to be the most upto date numbers. "Rejected absentee/mail-in ballots as a percentage of total absentee/mail-in ballots returned, 2016-2020" Georgia 2016 6.42% Georgia 2020 .60% Source https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2020:_Analysis_of_rejected_ballots https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2020:_Analysis_of_... Which cites the official Georgia election website as source of the raw data.
- jeremyjh 6y ago
  6.42% was the total rejection rate for all causes. Most ballots are rejected because they arrive late. Those are not yet included in the 2020 reject numbers. https://www.factcheck.org/2020/11/trump-misinformation-on-georgia-ballot-rejections/ https://www.factcheck.org/2020/11/trump-misinformation-on-ge...
  - dukeofdoom 6y ago
    The factcheck article is from November 20th. The Ballot tabulation website page says it has been updated December 9th (today) Its been weeks since the election, We don't even know how many votes have been cast still? This seems ridiculous. Most countries have final results on election night.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

cityofdelusion 6y ago

Is there any evidence that signature matching is an accurate way to ensure correctness? As a useless anecdote, my current signature looks _nothing_ like the one on my state issued ID from 10 years ago. Something that someone else said is quite important here: the time to fix these things is before an election, not afterwards. It doesn't take much imagination to see how invalidating large quantities of ballots after-the-fact is a dangerous road for a democracy. Put the rules and methods in place prior, in a bipartisan way.

dukeofdoom 6y ago
The Trump team did take this to court before the election, but they were denied on the basis of the "injury" only being hypothetical at that time... So they couldn't successfully sued before, and now they are told that its too late. Something very dishonest from the courts about that. Your own personal anecdote confirms that people's signatures change overtime. Hence more should have been rejected.
- sjwright 6y ago
  Relying on—and rejecting votes using—a poor method of voter identification is voter suppression. A signature shouldn't be used for identification matching but rather as akin to the signing of an affidavit.
  - dukeofdoom 6y ago
    Accepting votes that do not have matching signatures, is diluting the votes that do have matching signatures. Why should a person that voted in person, in a more secure way, have their votes diluted by a mailed in ballot that does not meet a minimum standard of security, and consequently are much more likely to be fraudulent. 1. Signature match is the minimum filter to prevent outright fake ballots. 2. I believe there was a procedure for rectifying a rejected mail-in ballot. The person still could have voted, if they sent in their ballot on time, and rectified any mistakes. 3. Mail-in ballots are really an assault on the right to a "secret ballot". There really is no guarantee that the mail-in ballot was filled out in secret. An abusive husband could for example coarse his wife to vote a certain way. A union boss, could coarse his workers to vote a certain way...and so on. This has happened in the past.

forgingahead 6y ago

You're right. It was interesting to learn that Obama won his first election in Chicago by getting his opponents disqualified due to signature issues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois_Senate_elections_of_Barack_Obama#Nominating_petition_challenges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois_Senate_elections_of_B... https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2007-04-04-0704030881-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2007-04-04-070403...

nl 6y ago

> If we don't have a meaningful signature match, than we don't have a meaningful way to prevent fraud with mail in ballots. Period. This isn't true at all. We've had mail-in voting in Australia for decades, and there is no signature matching. Some US states do use it at all. Signature verification is error prone and becoming more-so as less people use their signatures regularly. > Bad ballot Rejection rate of 6% in previous election to now 0.02%, with mail in ballots. Wikipedia says in the 2016 election 1% of mail ballots were rejected[1]. I'd expect that to be a lot less this year because of the increased emphasis on it and the much higher numbers, but I haven't verified your 0.02% number. But going from 1% to 0.02% shouldn't be surprising based on the completely different voting behavior this year. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_voting_in_the_United_States#Reliability_of_postal_ballots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_voting_in_the_United_St...

dukeofdoom 6y ago
Can you expend on how the process works in Australia. Genuinely curious. The 0.02% or the more recent 0.06% rejection rate is very low. Think of it this way. Out of 1000 people taking a test that needed two signatures, that matched. Only 2-6 did not not match. Thats an extremely low number. This is why teachers are always reminding students not to forget to sign their test, in a class of 30, and that only requires one signature. If you worked with the general public, and you asked them to tie their shoes, I honestly believe you would have a higher failure rate than 0.02%
- nl 6y ago
  > Out of 1000 people taking a test that needed two signatures, that matched. Only 2-6 did not not match. Thats an extremely low number. No that's not what it means. It means 2-6 were rejected. "Signature matching" is a junk process and should be ignored. In the AZ random sampling that the Judge asked for, 6/100 signatures were inconclusive, and this was on verified voters. > Can you expend on how the process works in Australia. Genuinely curious. https://www.aec.gov.au/faqs/postal-voting.htm https://www.aec.gov.au/faqs/postal-voting.htm You control the voting envelopes and ballot papers which is actually how fraud is controlled in the US too. The signature verification thing is nothing but ineffective security theatre.

codys 6y ago

As others have noted, the statistics you listed are recklessly inaccurate. That said: even if they were accurate, we'd still need to examine how may signature match failures result in detecting actual fraudulent voting, and how many signature match failures don't (ie they are false positives that serve to disenfranchise voters). It turns out that the vast majority (97%) of ballots rejected due to signature match issues are likely valid. IOW: we'd disenfranchise 32 people for every case of fraud occurring. I have personal doubts that the rate for fraud was even that high (3% of the % of ballots rejected for sig mismatch), as you'd expect some type of criminal charges resulting from it. Even assuming the 3% of sig rejects number, because that's already a % of sig rejects, it comes out to 3% of 0.2% (the actual number of sig mismatch rejections). This is 0.006% of the total vote. Additionally, signature match checking disproportionately rejects votes from specific groups, while accepting votes from other groups. In other words, having a signature check (or making it "stricter") allows tuning which demographics you accept votes from. Allowing this type of targeted disenfranchisement is not good

dukeofdoom 6y ago
Banks not accepting monopoly money also disenfranchises poor people. If banks did start accepting monopoly money, real money would become worth less. Having even a basic standard of verifiability and security is where the worth of money comes from. Also rights come with responsibilities. If you can't sing your signature in a consistent way, than maybe you should not vote by mail in ballot. Vote in person. Most up to date stats on the rejection rates that I found. 0.6% vs 6.4% in Georgia. https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2020:_Analysis_of_rejected_ballots https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2020:_Analysis_of_...
- codys 6y ago
  Others have previously responded to you reposting this link with this commentary, noting that the numbers included there are the result of a tabulating error. Continuing to attempt to use it to push misinformation after being informed is not acceptable.
  - 6y ago