Lawsuit seeks to ensure all mail-in ballots are counted

A federal lawsuit aims to ensure that legitimate ballots don’t get tossed out because of bad penmanship as record-high numbers of Pennsylvanians opt to vote by mail in the November presidential election.

The suit seeks to force election officials in Allegheny County and statewide to implement changes that give voters the chance to fix ballots when there’s either a perceived signature mismatch or a missing signature.

With the covid-19 pandemic generating high interest in voting by mail, “voters should not be required to risk their health or lives to cast a ballot they can be confident will count,” says the suit, filed Friday in Pennsylvania’s Eastern District by the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania, the Urban League of Greater Pittsburgh and two individual voters.

The suit names as defendants state and local elections officials, including Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald and Allegheny County Board of Elections members.

Fitzgerald and a county spokeswoman declined to comment Monday afternoon on active litigation or provide information related to the county’s signature verification process.

Allegheny County Councilwoman Bethany Hallam, who is named as a defendant because of her role on the county’s elections board, said she agrees with the lawsuit’s goal of ensuring voters have time to correct possible errors and that not a single valid mail-in vote should go uncounted. She also agreed with the lawsuit’s assertion that ballot verification processes should be uniform statewide.

She pointed out that her father has Parkinson’s disease and so his penmanship often is poor and his signature changes day to day.

The suit asserts that signature verification “is an inherently flawed means of determining whether a mail-in ballot is fraudulent or unlawfully cast.” The suit argues that the existing system risks depriving people of their fundamental right to vote.

“Signature variance is more common among certain populations of voters, including those with disabilities, those with less formal levels of education, elderly and young voters, and voters for whom English is a second language,” the suit says. “Parkinsonism and other neurological disorders can also significantly affect handwriting characteristics, engender unfounded scrutiny over the authenticity of signatures, and impede accurate assessment of them.”

‘Handful’ of Allegheny ballots rejected

Hallam said, of all of her election-related priorities, the signature verification process ranks “lower on the list” because it does not appear to be spurring ballots to be rejected on a large scale.

Fewer than 10 ballots cast in Allegheny County’s June primary — or 0.0045% of nearly 220,000 mail-in ballots cast — were rejected because of a signature-related issue, according to county spokeswoman Amie Downs.

Statewide, more than 26,500 absentee and mail-in ballots were rejected in the June election, for about 1.8% of nearly 1.5 million votes cast, the suit says. The lawsuit does not clarify how many of those rejections involved signatures deemed invalid.

County election officials rely on signature matching to verify mail-in ballots, but do not give voters adequate notice if their ballot was rejected because of a problem with the signature, the lawsuit claims.

“If you ask the county, they’ll tell you it’s the Department of State ballot-tracking apparatus that we use. But the county is the one that’s rejecting them,” Hallam said of the reports of such notification delays. “So, that’s where a big disconnect lies.”

By contrast, voters at a polling station are given the opportunity to verify their identity in the face of a signature issue and cast a ballot, the suit says.

“Each time a county board of elections — comprised of laypersons with no expertise in handwriting analysis — subjectively believes there is a mismatch between the signature accompanying the voter’s mail-in ballot and the signature in the voter’s file, that ballot is not counted,” the suit says, “notwithstanding the many benign factors that can cause signature variation.”

Similar lawsuits have been filed in New York, New Jersey and North Dakota.