Requiring a witness signature, or providing a photocopy ID, are “other proposed methods” that could be presented — the Vermont secretary of state report does not review them. Instead, it concludes that signature matching is inefficient.

A January 2023 report by the Vermont Secretary of State was mandated in 2021 by Act 60 to address issues related to mail-in ballots, including “implementing a voter verification system that will not disenfranchise voters and that will verify that ballots have been voted by registered voters.” The report discourages universal ballots for municipal elections and primaries, but concludes that no additional security safeguards for voter verification of (now-permanent) mail-in ballots are warranted.

Democratic voting by voice (“viva voce”) was employed at least as early as the seventh century B.C in Greece, and remains the regular method of voting under Robert’s Rules of Order. Over time, written ballots came to be favored over oral voting, usually provided in person — even executed before witnesses or a notary. The purpose of these procedures was to guarantee voting integrity. Voting in person is a long-favored American tradition, which then changed to allow absentee voting in response to war — early mail-in voting was “cause-only,” and designed to permit military service personnel to vote while away from home.

In recent years the issue of the potential of the threat of voter fraud has become intensely divisive. Yet the very existence of in-person, hand-delivered paper ballots was designed and implemented in America to combat widespread voting fraud. Prior to voting reforms of the 1880s, voting fraud was so rampant that it included “cooping,” which often targeted immigrants or voters of color:

Political parties employed tactics more often associated with pirates and human-trafficking gangs. Before sophisticated computer models were used to get out the vote, violent gangs would kidnap voters, feed them alcohol or drugs and force them to vote multiple times dressed in various disguises. Known as “cooping,” this was a common strategy to ensure a win on election day. … New African-American voters of the 1880s were often cooped until after election day, the threat of which was to keep them from voting on the Republican ticket, sometimes after Democrats already voted under African-American voters’ names.

If the purpose of an election system is to ensure public confidence and election integrity, trust in the electoral system must remain paramount. The Vermont Secretary of State acknowledges in its Report on Mailing Ballots that Vermont lacks ballot verification procedures:

While there are a variety of voter verification measures used across the country, including providing a witness signature, signature matching, and providing photocopy of an ID, the most commonly used method among the majority of states is signature matching. Vermont is not among the states that currently perform signature matching for verification, although Vermont does already require the voter to sign their ballot envelope, and in doing so, attest to the truth of the information on the certification under penalty of perjury. For the purposes of this analysis, we will focus on the use of signature matching as a potential verification system for Vermont, since it is the most commonly used in other states. If we are presented with other proposed methods of voter verification, we are happy to do the research into those.

Requiring a witness signature, or providing a photocopy ID, are “other proposed methods” that could be presented — the report does not review them. Instead, it concludes that signature matching is inefficient (“the process has the potential to create bottlenecks in the entire voting process and delay the count of ballots”), may create inequities in rejection rates, would be “extremely costly for Vermont,” and would be unfair to municipal employees:

Requiring our town clerks, assistant clerks, and election officials to become handwriting experts would represent another top-down mandate that will put undue stress and burden onto our local municipalities.

Implementing a comprehensive training program would be absolutely necessary. However, even with the most comprehensive and expert training, election officials are not trained forensic scientists or handwriting experts, and research suggests that non-experts are prone to deciding in error that authentic signatures do not match signatures on file. 

The secretary of state report raises important points, but the logic seems awry. Mail-in voting is endorsed, yet election officials are not trusted to confirm signatures, costs of compliance are prohibitive for vote verification, no alternatives to signature verification are considered, and no real argument for switching to mail-in voting is advanced. The fact that verifying votes by signature would cause delay in the election count is a good argument why mail-in voting is a problem not faced by in-person traditions: instead this concern is used to dismiss vote verification.

The Vermont secretary of state report concludes with similar bureaucratic circularity:

The impetus for implementing such a verification system is often to prevent fraud, but research has shown that fraud is extremely rare and signature verification is more likely to disenfranchise voters than it is to weed out any fraudulent ballots. … We are confident in the current systems to verify voter identities upon registration and confirm eligibility, and we believe the penalties for voter impersonation and perjury are sufficient to discourage the fraudulent submission of voted ballots.

Actually, the sole impetus for implementation of verification systems is always fraud, based on historic experiences of the willingness of some people to cheat. Perhaps a voter identification requirement would be a trustworthy middle road. Or will the next step be voting by text? 

John Klar is an attorney and farmer residing in Brookfield. © Copyright True North Reports 2023. All rights reserved.