The Lost Cause of Signature Confirmation
Florida Governor DeSantis wants to pass a law that would require signatures on mail-in ballots to match the most recent signature the state has on file for that individual. The Tampa Bay Times accepted this premise at face value and then dug through DeSantis’ past and put his signature history to the test.
DeSantis wants voters’ signatures to match. Would his pass the test?
Experts and election officials who reviewed DeSantis’ signature history for the Times said some of the modifications in his penmanship could have posed trouble for election workers, especially if constrained to one point of comparison. In a handful of instances, it’s possible the ballot could have been rejected, they said.
This is a very entertaining example of investigative journalism, and I commend their efforts.
But on the merits of the proposed law itself, signature confirmation as a means of detecting fraud is extremely puzzling to me. A signature is nothing like a fingerprint, in that it never stays identical for the same person and it's relatively trivial to fake it. The classic trick of forging a signature is to copy it upside down as a way to prevent your penmanship from going into automatic mode. And as demonstrated here, Tampa Bay Times found multiple variations and modifications to DeSantis' signature over the years. DeSantis, as a prosecutor and government official, ranks extremely high in terms of frequency of having to sign things. You could also argue that signing things on a frequent basis would reduce the variance (but I recognize reasonable people can argue the opposite). If so, then a normal person who has to sign things on paper maybe once every few years might run into problems if their signature has to match each time.
I don't see how this proposed law is supposed to solve anything. It seems like just doing something for the sake of looking like you've done something.
Another example of the type of god-tier journalism on display here has to be from the Willamette Week in 2002. After the Portland Police Chief said that drug suspects had “no right to privacy” to prevent searching their trash without a warrant, journalists from WW dug through his and other city officials’ trash and published what they found:
Perched in his office on the 15th floor of the Justice Center, Chief Kroeker seemed perfectly comfortable with the idea of trash as public property.
"Things inside your house are to be guarded," he told WW. "Those that are in the trash are open for trash men and pickers and--and police. And so it's not a matter of privacy anymore."
Then we spread some highlights from our haul on the table in front of him.
"This is very cheap," he blurted out, frowning as we pointed out a receipt with his credit-card number, a summary of his wife's investments, an email prepping the mayor about his job application to be police chief of Los Angeles, a well-chewed cigar stub, and a handwritten note scribbled in pencil on a napkin, so personal it made us cringe.