Bins full of absentee ballots await Wake County Board of Elections review. (Photo: Lynn Bonner)
North Carolina’s 10-county signature verification pilot program for absentee ballots cost the state $450,000 to review about 2,200 envelopes.
The legislature required the state Board of Elections to conduct the signature verification pilot as part of a sweeping package of election changes enacted over then-Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto in 2023.
The verification software failed to match signatures on about 11% of absentee ballots cast in last year’s primary with voters’ signatures on file. Most of the software-rejected signatures were approved after county election boards reviewed them.
The law prohibited ballots from being rejected because signatures didn’t match.
Technical problems hampered the signature verification test. Scanners had trouble interpreting the barcodes printed on the ballots. Voter signatures that went outside the boundaries of the relatively small boxes on the absentee ballot envelopes made software signature matching difficult. Images of reference signatures were of variable quality, depending on their age, whether they were made using a stylus on a computer trackpad rather than in ink on paper, or if portions were clipped when election workers manually processed images from voter registration forms.
Board of Elections Director Karen Brinson Bell sent the report on the pilot program to the Joint Legislative Elections Oversight Committee on Jan. 31. Carolina Public Press was the first to provide the details. Carolina Public Press quoted Jay DeLancy, once a supporter of signature verification, saying it wouldn’t work. DeLancy is head of a controversial conservative group that hunts for voter fraud.
North Carolina would be the only state requiring three types of verification
Voting rights advocates have criticized signature verification as unnecessary.
Absentee ballots require two witness signatures or a notary signature. People who vote by mail are also required to send a copy of their photo ID or form explaining why they don’t have one.
Thirty-one states use signature verification for absentee ballots, according to the National Council of State Legislatures.
Only Mississippi requires both signature verification and a notary signature, according to NCSL.
North Carolina would be the only state to require signature verification, witness signatures, and photo ID.
“That level of redundancy to verify who the voter is is at bottom voter suppression,” said Katelin Kaiser, policy director at Democracy NC. “This is just a slippery slope to ensuring only some voices in our democracy are heard.”
A bill the state Senate approved last year would have required signature verification statewide after July 1 of this year. That bill failed to get a hearing or vote in the state House.
Durham was the largest county in the pilot. It spent $4,000 of its own money and staff devoted 80 hours to it, the most of any county. Henderson County spent between $2,000 and $2,500.
Four counties didn’t spend any of their own money.
Wilkes County had the largest percentage of ballots, about 39%, passed on for manual review because the software failed to match signatures. The software matched signatures on all five ballots Jones County tested.
Studies in other states had found that signature matching criteria were unevenly applied, with some counties more likely to reject signatures. Other studies found that younger voters and voters of color are were more likely to have their signatures rejected.
When the state Board of Elections considered a 2022 request from the state Republican Party to require signature matching, critics said it would disadvantage voters with disabilities and older voters whose signatures have changed over time.
For the most part, disparities based on race and age didn’t show up in the North Carolina pilot.
Black voters accounted for 10.6% of ballots tested and about 10% of the signatures the software couldn’t match. Asian voters cast 1.7% of the absentee ballots tested and accounted for 1.8% of the signatures that didn’t match. White voters cast 80% of the absentee ballots tested and accounted for 80.5% of the signature failures.
Voters 26 and younger cast 5.7% of the ballots tested and had 5.5% of the failed matches.
Voters over 75 years old cast 39% of absentee ballots in the test, and accounted for 38% of the failures. Voters 66-75 years old cast 26.2% of the ballots tested and accounted for 28% of the failures.
Costs will increase with statewide implementation
The signature verification pilot was delayed because the State Board had trouble finding a company that could meet all state requirements.
In her report, Brinson Bell advised legislators to consider the cost of statewide implementation. The equipment and software the state used for the pilot were a relatively basic product that took into account fewer people would be voting in a primary than a general election.
Large counties will require a more expensive system with additional features. Ongoing expenses would include annual software licensing fees, maintenance and service agreements, and materials, she wrote. Counties would also bear additional costs.
Brinson Bell warned of adding signature verification to an already heavy workload that counties must now complete under significant time constraints. Last year, the legislature tightened the timeline for county boards to count absentee ballots.
Absentee ballots that arrive on Election Day must be counted on that day in a meeting that continues until the work is finished.
The new law will require absentee ballot processing at a “break-neck pace,” she wrote.
In many counties, absentee ballot counting in a general election will stretch past midnight, “meaning that many county board members and staff will be working more than 24 hours straight. Adding another complex task to this schedule will further exacerbate what will already be a questionable labor practice.”