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Comment by DebtDeflation | Hacker News Reader

>2) 1/4 are "signature didn't match"

I've always felt that matching signatures was a terrible way of authenticating voters. The person doing the matching is not a trained handwriting expert. Also, like many people, I have subpar handwriting and I highly doubt my signature today looks anything like what it did when I first registered to vote 25+ years ago.

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When I lived in King County Washington half the time my vote was sent back due to mismatching signature. Heard similar stories from others. Maybe it stops fraud, but the high false negative rate is egregious.

maybe it is fraud. who audits the people who compare it?

Plus we're talking about "signature experts" as if there's a solid science there. From what I understand, it's a bit of a cargo cult where you just package up "do they look similar" in the trimmings of hard science.

Plus, it has a way of working out that people with names like Lakisha or Jamal might find themselves stuggling to match their signatures more than people with names like Chris or Alice.

It works well enough because all of the real authentication happens after you register and before you ever get a ballot. So there isn't really much fraud risk from you actually sending in the ballot, the signature is just the cherry on top.

The on site signature books are set up for right handed use. The helper has to move their hand shielding the printed signature so lefties can just copy what they wrote :)

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