As mentioned earlier, King County Elections wanted to convince more voters to vote by mail using

Flyers featuring VIPs who are converting to VBM which we can hand out at special events, booths, public meetings, etc.

King County Superior Court Judge William Downing (no conservative, he) sent this angry e-mail to Canvassing Board member Dan Satterberg and County Councilman Bob Ferguson to complain that his grown son Sam's Primary Election ballot was wrongly rejected for signature miscomparison. Sam was in Uruguay and could not correct the problem in time for his ballot to count. The elder Downing complained again a month later when two General Election absentee ballots were sent to Sam at the family residence and he wasn't sure which ballot to FedEx to Uruguay.

Anne Bruskland, then acting assistant superintendent in charge of voter registration, claimed that Sam's signature was rejected because

The signature we had on file for your son was from 1982. As you can imagine, signatures can change quite a bit in that timeframe.

Downing is hardly the first voter to receive multiple ballots or to have his ballot thrown in the trash because of a wrong signature rejection. County records show that from September 2004 through November 2006, over 12,400 voters had at least one ballot thrown out, nearly 2% of all voters who voted by mail during that period. Those rejections either represent a lot of disenfranchised voters, or a lot of blocked attempts at voter fraud (which some say is a myth!). Another 10,700 voters had to go to the trouble of filing a signature affidavit to ensure that their vote would count after their ballot was wrongly rejected. "Signature verification" is not audited, so there's no way of knowing how many bogus signatures are wrongly accepted. (but I've seen examples where it does happen). I don't know whether there's any bias in "signature verification" that favors one group or another, but clearly it's a lousy method for ensuring an accurate count in a close election.

Instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising campaigns to try to convince more voters to vote by mail, King County should ensure that the system works decently for people like Sam Downing who have no choice but to vote absentee.

The e-mail exchange with Judge Downing includes these priceless comment from Satterberg, who has served on the Canvassing Board longer than anybody else in recent years:

The security against voter fraud in the mail ballot process is the signature verification process which, as you well know from your days as a prosecutor, a subjective process that is more art than science

Satterberg adds:

I vote at the polls...