HONOLULU — As with many Maui voters, Joshua Kamalo believed the race for president wasn’t the only big contest on the November ballot. It also focused on a contested local government board seat.
He made sure to return the mail-in ballot early in nearly every situation, doing so two weeks before Election Day. A week later, he received a letter saying the county could not verify his signature on the return envelope, jeopardizing his vote.
And he was not the only one. Two other people from the biodiesel company where he works were also denied the vote, as was his daughter. In each case, the county said their signatures did not match those on file.
“I don’t know how they fix this, but I don’t think it’s right,” said Kamalo, a truck driver who braved traffic congestion and limited parking options to get to the county office to sign the affidavit. the signature was actually his.
He said it probably wouldn’t have been resolved if the South Maui county council race wasn’t so close. The co-founder of his employer, Pacific Biodiesel, was the candidate who ended up on the losing side.
Kamalo’s experience is part of a broader problem as mail-in voting grows in popularity and more states choose to mail ballots to all voters. Matching signatures on returned ballot envelopes to registered officials at local polling stations can be a laborious process, sometimes done by humans and sometimes by automation, and can result in dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of ballots being rejected.
If the voter cannot correct it in time, the vote will not be counted.
“There’s been a lot of push for mail-in voting in recent years, and I think the margins aren’t always clear to voters,” said Larry Norden, an election and government expert at the Brennan Center for Justice.
He said it’s important for states and local governments to have procedures in place to ensure they don’t miss out on large numbers of eligible mail-in voters.
The use of postal ballots exploded in 2020 as states looked for ways to accommodate voters during the COVID-19 pandemic. Eight states and the District of Columbia have universal mail-in voting, in which a ballot is mailed to all active registered voters unless they opt out.
At least 30 states require election officials to notify voters if there is a problem with their mail-in ballot and give them an opportunity to fix or “cure” it. Some have complained that the period allowed to do so is too short.
Nevada, a key presidential battleground, is among the states that send ballots to all registered voters. In November, county election offices rejected about 9,000 mail-in ballots, mostly because of signature problems.
That didn’t affect the outcome of the state’s presidential race, which Donald Trump won by 46,000 votes, but it could have changed the outcome in some down-ballot contests. Some state legislative seats in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas and had more than half of the rejected mail-in ballots, were decided by just a few hundred votes. The North Las Vegas City Council race, also in Clark County, was decided by nine votes.
“Since we passed universal mail-in voting in 2020 during the pandemic, we’ve had problems with signature healing, and it seems to be getting worse,” said Sondra Cosgrove, professor of history and executive director of Southern Nevada in Las Vegas. Vote Nevada, a civic organization. “A level of crisis is something that needs to be resolved.”
The potential for signature-match issues to affect close races has led some state voting rights groups to call for an overhaul of the vetting process.
“We need to find the best option going forward for people who are more accessible, who vote and who count the votes on time, because it’s crazy when you think that the difference maker is eight or nine votes,” said Christian Solomon. State director of Rise Nevada, a youth-led civic engagement group.
Nevada voters already took a step toward a potential solution in November when 73 percent approved a constitutional amendment that would require voters to present identification to vote. When voting by mail, in addition to a signature, a driver’s license or Social Security number will be required. Voters must approve the amendment a second time in two years for it to take effect.
Dave Gibbs, president of Repair the Vote PAC, which wrote the amendment, said it was inspired by a law passed in another 2021 presidential state, Georgia.
That state ended its signature verification process and instead requires voters to submit their driver’s license number or state identification card number when returning a mail-in ballot, said Mike Hassinger, a spokesman for the Georgia Secretary of State. Most votes are cast early, but face to face.
Critics say such identification requirements would be too burdensome for states like Hawaii, where mail-in ballots make up the vast majority of votes.
In Maui, the number of rejected mail-in ballots sparked a lawsuit challenging the results of a local council election, where the winning margin was just 97 votes.
The lawsuit alleges that hundreds of ballots were not counted because the county clerk mistakenly said they were placed in envelopes with signatures that did not match what was on file. Attorney Lance Collins said his clients wanted a new election in the race between Tom Cook and his client Kelly King.
Six voters submitted statements saying they were told the signature on the ballot envelope was poor, when in their opinion there was nothing wrong.
Collins said that under state administrative rules, a returned ballot belongs to the voter and must be counted unless there is evidence to suggest it does not belong to the voter. He also said that the rejection rate in the region is significantly higher than the national average.
Maui County attorneys responded in court that the signature verification process followed the law. On December 24, the state Supreme Court unanimously upheld and declared Cook the winner. The justices said the clerk gave voters reasonable notice and an opportunity to correct the error in the ballot envelopes.
However, many Maui voters have shared similar stories about being told their signatures don’t match. Resident Grace Min, who was not a party to the lawsuit, was among those who received one of the letters.
“I find it very strange that my (vote) signature is not my signature,” he said.
He paid special attention to the provincial governor race that he knew would be close, so it was important to make sure his vote counted. She emailed an affidavit confirming the vote was hers, but she also had questions about the verification process and was concerned that the time allowed to heal the votes was so short.
“I have to imagine there must have been people who didn’t fix the signature,” Min said, “and that doesn’t seem very fair.”
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