Tag: signature verification

[Member Post]

 

Yes, there are some funny ha-ha things about the recent election.  I worked for my County doing signature-verification from a week before the election to three days after.  My state has had all-mail balloting for at least 10 years.  My state votes so heavily Democrat, they never need to cheat on a large scale. The […]

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Dispatch from the Election Worker: Day One of Real Work

 

At 8:30 a.m., I started my temporary, seasonal, election worker job, doing Signature Verification for my County, which has all-mail voting (the state has been all-mail for many years now). [On the news today is a story stating that our state received a perfect score on its handling of all-mail voting]. I think I made about half a dozen errors, but the supervisors were able to extricate me without much problem. By the end of the day, I checked in the neighborhood of 3,000 ballot signatures.

There were 16 of us at work today, which would account for about 48,000 total ballot signatures verified. Some, but not many, were challenged for various reasons. The most common reason was “signatures do not match.” I had a few. I saw more than one “symbol” signatures, each of which had its required two witness signatures (the most common reason for this is a voter disabled, or otherwise unable to sign their name).

Dispatch from an Election Worker, Training Day

 

I went to the building where my county will be processing all the mail-in ballots.  Washington State has had all-mail voting for many years, so it goes pretty smoothly.  I signed up for “signature verification” and had training most of the day today.  The first hour was mostly routine paperwork, and policy stuff, and the usual COVID rules.  All surfaces must be wiped down at the beginning and end of every shift, all computer hardware and desks must be wiped down when you arrive and leave; masks must be worn all day, except when eating lunch.  The best part of the training was when a gentleman from the State Patrol Crime Lab came in to show us the ins and outs of signature verification.  That was extremely interesting, and we had some exercises, matching signatures, both cursive and printed.  I already had some idea of what characteristics to look for, and learned a lot more.  After he was done, the lead person showed us how the computer signature-matching program works, and we got to look at some real ballots that had already been returned.

Since voter-registration now is done mostly at the DMV, your signature for “matching” with your ballot is the signature on your driver’s license.  Most voters have more than one signature on file (from every time you renew your license-we old folks have most), and verification looked fairly straightforward.  The last activity of the day was logging into the County computer system, then logging into the Election system for the state.  This is where most of the problems occurred.  Some people had trouble logging into the county system, some didn’t have Internet access, and many couldn’t log into the state election site (turns out, the locals had not created accounts for most of us, so she had to do them while we waited. My problem was a typo in my name!).  I made sure that my login password had Trump in it, so I can smile every time I log in.

[Member Post]

 

Just after we returned from our South Dakota vacation, I submitted an application to my county for a seasonal election-worker position.  They have a variety of positions, and I went for the “signature-verification” job.  I had a phone interview with a very nice lady yesterday, and today I was offered the job, and accepted.  We […]

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