by - Gen Z voters who have difficulty with italics could delay the vote count, Nevada’s secretary of state said.
- He attributed higher numbers of problematic ballots to young voters without signatures.
- Many schools stopped teaching cursive in 2010, creating a generation unfamiliar with the style.
Young people increasingly lack a clear signature due to decades of declining handwriting education — a shortcoming that could hinder Gen Z voters from casting their ballots.
Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar warned Tuesday morning that a relatively large number of mail-in ballots had already been rejected in Clark and Washoe County, two of the state’s most populous counties, due to signature matching problems.
“It’s mainly due to the fact that young people today don’t have autographs anymore,” Aguilar told The New York Times. “And when they registered to vote through the automatic voter registration process, they signed a digital notepad at the DMV, and that became their license signature.”
States in the U.S. require a voter’s signature on mail-in and absentee ballots, and several states require additional verifications, including comparing that signature to the voter’s signature on file. About two-thirds of states have a “cure” process to notify voters that their ballots have not been counted and allow them to correct the error, which can take several days and delay the vote-counting process extend, according to the National Conference of States. Legislature.
Ballots without verifiable signatures will not be counted in states without a cure process.
More than 11,300 mail-in ballots needed repairs in Clark County, and more than 1,800 in Washoe County, on the eve of Election Day, according to the Nevada Secretary of State. As the state continues to process mail-in ballots this week, these numbers — which are already higher than in 2020 and 2022 — are expected to rise.
“When you start looking at the data, and you start realizing how high it is, then you get nervous, because again, these races are so close, the margins are so small, that I don’t want to look at the numbers.” numbers tonight and know that we have to wait for the ballots to heal,” Aguilar told The Times on Tuesday.
In a follow-up press release, Aguilar said the need for signature healing goes beyond youth and includes “older voters who may sign their names differently over the course of their lives, voters who recently got married but have not updated their voter registration , and yes, young people for whom perhaps no permanent signature has yet been developed.”
Voting inconsistencies are not unique to Tuesday’s election. Hundreds of thousands of ballots, or about 1%, were rejected across the country in the 2022 midterm elections, NPR reported at the time.
But as voting by mail becomes more common and younger voters continue to struggle with the style, the problem is likely to persist.
Debra Cleaver, founder of Vote America and Vote.Org, has long advocated eliminating signature matching and replacing it with a verifiable and unique identifier, such as an ID or a combination of birthday and partial Social Security number.
“The fundamental problem here is that a signature is not a unique identifier,” Cleaver said. “The secondary problem is that schools no longer teach cursive.”
Since 2010, many states have dropped the proficiency from their curricula as part of the widespread shift to the Common Core State Standards for English, which did not explicitly include cursive instruction.
As a result, many people in their late teens and early twenties received little to no cursive instruction and thus few opportunities to practice developing their unique signature.
“You can’t have all these people who don’t have signatures and aren’t experiencing problems,” Cleaver said. “It’s going to become a bigger and bigger problem.”
However, in recent years, several states, including California and Louisiana, have passed legislation to reintroduce the skill into classrooms.