Washblog

Overseas absentee ballots

Short and sweet. I am over in Ireland and had my absentee ballot in well before election day. Today I received a letter from the Elections Dept stating that they could not match my ballot signature "due to the quality of the elctronic image of my signature". They had no problems with my primary ballot 2 months ago.
Is anyone else having a similar problem? I have to get a form back to them from over here before Nov. 27th to have my ballot counted.

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Try putting an ad on Craig's List -- WA (I see only one for Seattle/Tacoma:  http://forums.seattle.craigslist.org/).

Try advertising on Democratic Underground and Seattle Indymedia, etc.  

Keep us updated, Absentee -- I'd like to hear how the process goes.  

by noemie maxwell on Wed Nov 08, 2006 at 04:39:21 PM PST

Hi Absentee-

I meant to reply quicker. Sorry for the delay.

What county are you voting in?

I think what you're experiencing is inevitable. Signatures change. Names change. People move. Etc.

There's always administrivia that happens in election services as systems are changed, upgraded, get a good data quality scrubbing. For instance, the way I understand it, a few years ago King Co rescanned all of the voter registrations a few years ago. There was a batch of scans that inadvertently cut off people's signatures. The mistake was eventually caught, but it caused problems. (Note that all change, good or bad, is disruptive.)

I think there's a regular refreshing of people's voter registrations. Every year, some X percentage of voters have their registrations marked as "inactive", an unfortunate term, which means the voter simply needs to update their registration.

I've also been working to understand how signature verification works. It's a pretty subjective process. In King County, it's done by a minor army of temporary workers. They get the proper training and so forth. But it's not like these guys are forensic scientists.

Lastly...

King County, Whatcom County, and probably a few others, are evaluating an automatic signature verification tools called Diebold VoteRemote. (Googling "VoteRemote" highlights the controversy with this gear.)

The effectiveness of systems like VoteRemote is quantified by the false positive rate (FPR) and false negative rate (FNR). They are by no means foolproof. And definitely completely untested and unproven. Clients (like King County) are supposed to "train" the system (a literal blackbox that's not even understood by the vendor) and then set "certainty" thresholds for match, non-match, and maybe. Clearly, a very subjective process. (I've got a draft report, which I really need to finish up and publish.)

I mention all this to make a few points. Signature verification is very labor intensive. It's subjective. As with all processes, every additional processing step introduces more opportunities for errors.

by zappini on Thu Nov 09, 2006 at 04:21:22 PM PST

...voter hotline numbers that were set up for election day? Did everybody close up shop on November 8th?

I don't know how King County is verifying signatures, but I would imagine that if they do it by mail, people who dropped off their ballots on election day are getting postcards right about now.

by m3047 on Sat Nov 11, 2006 at 04:10:01 AM PST

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We Americans have found ourselves in a pivotal era where we have traded humanity for patriotism. Where we have traded civil liberties for a sense of security. I stand here before you sharing the same idea as Henry David Thoreau: as an American, and as a Human Being, we mustn't lend ourselves to that same evil which we condemn." Quoted from:
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THE EVANGELICAL PHENOMENON
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