HONOLULU (AP) — As with many voters on Maui, Joshua Kamalo thought the presidential race wasn’t the only big contest on the November ballot. He also was focused on a hotly contested seat for the local governing board.
He returned his ballot in the virtually all-vote-by-mail state early two weeks before Election Day. A week later, he received a letter telling him the county couldn’t verify his signature on the return envelope, jeopardizing his vote.
And he wasn’t alone. Two other voters at the biodiesel company where he works, as did his daughter, had their ballots rejected. In each case, the county said their signatures didn’t match the ones on file.
“I don’t know how they fix that, but I don’t think it’s right,” said Kamalo, a truck driver who endured traffic congestion and limited parking to get to the county office to sign an affidavit affirming that the signature was indeed his.
He said he wouldn’t have troubled himself to patch it up had the race for South Maui County Council been closer. His company’s co-founder, Pacific Biodiesel, ended up on the short end of the contest.
Kamalo’s experience is part of a larger problem as mail voting becomes more popular and more states choose to send ballots to all voters. Matching signatures on returned mail ballot envelopes to the official ones recorded at local voting offices can be time-consuming, sometimes done by humans and sometimes through automation. It can result in hundreds or even thousands of ballots being rejected.
There has been a major push toward voting by mail during the last few years,” said Larry Norden, elections and government fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. “Sometimes, the trade-offs aren’t always clear for voters.”
“The procedures that will be in effect in states or local governments should ensure no large numbers of eligible mail ballot voters are disenfranchised.
Mail ballots exploded in 2020 as states sought to accommodate voters during the COVID-19 pandemic. Eight states and the District of Columbia now have universal mail voting, in which all active registered voters are mailed a ballot unless they opt-out.
