North Carolina doesn’t verify voter signatures on mail-in ballots. Is that a problem?

As local boards of elections meet this week to review the final set of mail-in ballots, they’ll look to make sure that the voter’s name and signature are on the front of each envelope.

But they won’t look to see if that signature matches one on file somewhere, because voter signature matching is not required in North Carolina.

Signature matching is a common practice, required in 30 states, to help protect the legitimacy of absentee mail-in ballots. But it’s not mandated in everywhere, including in key battleground states such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Karen Bell, the executive director of the N.C. State Board of Elections, explained North Carolina’s policy in a memo in August.

“County boards shall accept the voter’s signature on the container-return envelope if it appears to be made by the voter, meaning the signature on the envelope appears to be the name of the voter and not some other person,” Bell wrote.

Bell wrote that every voter’s signature is assumed to be valid unless there is clear evidence otherwise, “even if the signature is illegible.”

The number of North Carolina voters who chose to mail in their ballots for the fall election was more than five times the number in 2016. Elections officials anticipated the higher number because of concerns about voting in person during the coronavirus pandemic.

Some, including President Donald Trump, have claimed that the surge in absentee mail-in voting created more opportunities for fraud and threatened the integrity of the election.

North Carolina has several requirements to prevent fraud with mail-in ballots, says Patrick Gannon, spokesman for the State Board of Elections. For starters, the ballots are only sent to registered voters who have used an official form or virtual portal to request one.

And voters are required to mark their ballots in front of a witness, who is also required to sign the envelope attesting to the voter’s identity. In previous years, two witnesses were required, but the General Assembly reduced the requirement to one this year because of the pandemic. North Carolina is one of only 11 states to require notary or witness signatures on mail-in ballot envelopes, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The witness signature helps, says Andy Jackson, an election policy analyst at Civitas Institute, a conservative policy organization, but voter signature matching would add another level of security.

“If you’ve got two people to sign in the witness area and they get a hold of a ballot either by picking one up from a mailbox or whatever, then they would have to make a reasonable forgery for that ballot to get past the scanners,” Jackson said.

Without signature matching, Jackson says, it’d be easier to falsify a ballot.

But critics of signature matching say many authentic mail-in ballots get thrown out because someone determines the signatures don’t line up. Testifying for the League of Women Voters of Ohio, which challenged that state’s signature matching law, political scientist Alexander Street said based on known rates of mail-in voter fraud that 97% of ballots that were said to have mismatching signatures were actually legitimate.

“To put it another way, for every one invalid ballot that is correctly rejected for signature mismatch, an additional 32 valid ballots are wrongly rejected due to errors by the non‐experts trying to verify signatures,” wrote Street, a professor at Carroll College in Montana.

The plaintiffs in the Ohio case also argued that signature matching disproportionately affects non-native English speakers, young voters, the elderly and people with disabilities. But a federal judge sided with the state, which still requires it.

Gannon, the spokesman for the state elections board, said the ultimate safeguard against fraudulent mail-in voting is public scrutiny.

“Many people are watching North Carolina’s absentee voting process, including candidates, political parties, county boards of elections, political and data scientists and the media,” he said. “If there are anomalies or questionable activities, they will be reported to election officials.”

This story was originally published November 11, 2020 at 2:13 PM.