Verity and the Signature Line on the Ballot

The multiple choice spots on a ballot even if they are all filled in, do not prove that a vote has been cast.

They prove that it is possible to make a mark on a piece of paper, that’s it.

The affirmation that the marks on that piece of paper comprise the vote of a person occurs on the signature line. The signature says “This is my vote”.

“This is” (the proclamation) “my vote” (the affirmation of what it is and whose it is.

So, the signature match is not a detail. It is the crux of the vote which is an affirmation of some choices. The vote is not the piece of paper with marks on it. The vote is the affirmation that the filled out ballot is my choices, my liberty, my consent of the governed.

The match is done against samples of that person’s signature on other documents which are on file such as a driver’s license, a government form, a check, a contract, a lease, a title, or a student ID. The match is done mostly using an algorithm in a computer that looks for features of the signature, sort of like facial recognition, or fingerprint matching, or fingerprint matching. Computers can do this kind of thing very fast.

Where there is no signature, or the “match” is not good enough to satisfy the algorithm, and thus is rejected as a non-match, the signature can be “cured” by the “voter” by providing a second sample. Or, the election Judges can waive the signature match requirement, because of age, impairment, or the fact that they have copious other evidence that is fully adequate to establish the identity of that particular voter, such as a photo, or an in person face/photo comparison done by an election official at the ballot handing out table.

We have become a nation where everybody gets a trophy, just for participation, whether they deserve it or not, that is our millenial/snowflake value system today, more’s the pity. Standards and excellence have been replaced by the feature of just being there. So, we don’t have rigor in the voter ID process in many states.

Pennsylvania sent out 250,000 mail-in ballots and the state has absolutely NO IDEA who they sent them to. The recipients were not verified. These ballots will show up somewhere. When they do, if the voter ID is slipshod and haphazard, trophy for everybody, then there could be a quarter million felons or foreigners, dead people, or adjudicated insane people voting in the Pennsylvania election, the state that gave us Benjamin Franklin.

In the 1950’s democracy worked in USA. Not so much today. Maybe in 10 years time we can get back to making it work again. But not in 2 years time. So the 2024 election will be much the same as the 2022 midterms in terms of the quality and verity of the event.