A study of Maricopa County, Arizona’s mail-in ballots during the 2020 presidential election estimates that over 200,000 ballots with mismatched signatures were counted - without being reviewed or “cured."
The signature verification pilot study, commissioned by the Arizona State Senate and conducted by Shiva Ayyadurai’s Election Systems Integrity Institute, went public on Tuesday.
Of the 1,911,918 early voting mail-in ballots received in Maricopa County, the county reported that 25,000 - 1.3 percent - had signature mismatches that required curing, but only 587 of those were confirmed mismatched, per Just the News.
Under the county’s election rules, a reviewer first compares the signature on the envelope with the signature on file for the voter. If the signatures do not appear to match, the ballot is cured. During this process, the voter is contacted to determine whether or not the signature is theirs.
In the study, three expert forensic document examiners and three novices reviewed 499 images of early voting mail-in ballot envelopes to determine if all the signatures matched with those on file.
The reviewers agreed that 60 of the 499 envelopes were mismatched signatures.
The 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.”
