Arizona Senate study finds 200k ballots counted in 2020 with mismatched signatures By for Just The News
Estimate is more than eight times the number of mismatches acknowledged by the county.
A study of Maricopa County’s mail ballots in Arizona’s 2020 presidential election estimates that more than 200,000 ballots with mismatched signatures were counted without being reviewed, or “cured” — more than eight times the 25,000 signature mismatches requiring curing acknowledged by the county.
Commissioned by the Arizona State Senate, the signature verification pilot study was conducted by Shiva Ayyadurai’s Election Systems Integrity Institute, which released its final report to the public on Tuesday. Ayyadurai is an engineer and entrpreneur with four degrees from MIT who bills himself as the inventor of email, a claim which critics have alleged is exaggerated.
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Of the 1,911,918 early voting mail ballots that Maricopa County received and counted in the 2020 presidential election, the county reported that 25,000, or 1.3%, had signature mismatches that required curing, but only 587 (2.3%) of those were confirmed mismatched signatures.
Under Maricopa County election rules, a reviewer first compares a signature on an envelope with the signature on file for the voter, which takes about 4-30 seconds. If the signature does not appear to match, the ballot is cured, which takes three or more minutes and includes attempts to contact the voter to determine whether or not the signature is a match.
In the signature verification study, three expert forensic document examiners and three novices reviewed 499 images of early voting mail ballot envelopes to determine if the signatures on them matched with the signatures on file. All the reviewers agreed that 60 of the 499 envelopes, or 12% were signature mismatches.
The pilot study extrapolated from the sample that more than 204,430 ballots should have been cured, and 5,277 should have been rejected.
“We want to be humble about this,” Ayyadurai said in a virtual presentation of the study. “While the study is compelling, an expanded study is warranted to confirm the findings of this study.”
