That’s especially true in Maricopa County, the largest county in Arizona and a focal point of false claims about election fraud. Under a more stringent review process, the number of ballots rejected in the county for questionable signatures tripled, from 586 to 1,798, between the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 midterm. That doesn’t include the ballots rejected because there was no voter signature at all — 1,299 in 2022.
But flaws in the county’s signature verification process may lead to disenfranchisement that disproportionately affects voters who are younger, newly registered or those who do not belong to a political party, Votebeat and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting found in a monthslong analysis of the rejected midterm ballots.
In a state where some elections are decided by just a few hundred votes, these rejected ballots — about 3,000 at the state level for mismatched signatures alone in 2022 — could affect the outcome of an election.
Votebeat and AZCIR mailed letters to all 1,798 Maricopa County voters who had their ballots rejected for this reason, analyzed who they are and spoke to more than a dozen of them about their experience.
Newer and younger voters are more likely to have their signature affected, the investigation found, in part because they may only have one signature on file, and that signature is most commonly from their driver’s license record, signed on an electronic pad. Those electronic signatures often don’t capture how a voter really signs their name.
The rejections for mismatched signatures also disproportionately impact voters not affiliated with a political party, in large part because they don’t have the backing of a political party to help contact voters once signature problems are identified.
And the analysis confirms what voter advocates have long said: Older voters and those with disabilities sometimes see their ballots rejected because their signatures have changed over time….