The Constitution Party of Illinois expects to file a lawsuit on September 1 to get its statewide slate of candidates on the Illinois ballot. Illinois requires 25,000 valid signatures. After employees of the State Board of Elections checked each signature, they found 25,017 valid signatures. But then members of the Board reduced the valid number to 22,000. They did this by presuming that certain signatures must be forged, because the signature on the petition does not resemble the signature on the voter registration form.
The party says that is because some voters have not signed a voter registration form in decades, and as these voters have aged, the appearance of their signature has changed.
When the Board found a signature it believed had been forged, it then disqualified all the signatures on the same sheet. This is the same reasoning that led the Board to disqualify the statewide Libertarian slate in 1998. See this story. Thanks to Jeff Trigg for the link.
“as these voters have aged, the appearance of their signature has changed.”
I run into this a lot, especially with folks who have had a stroke. Often, the person with them offers to be Power of Attorney. I usually try to write “POA” or “stroke” in the margin, though not sure how acceptable this is.
Also, many people are in a hurry when signing, and just sign with their first initial, or nickname, or worse just a quick scribble – which then doesn’t match their full signature on voter registration records.
A challenge to this should be weather any of the signature verifiers have had training in handwriting analysis. I doubt they have, so the case could be made to either have the elections board spend the money on handwriting training, or validate all the signatures!
Jeff,
The real question is whether weather should be weather or whether?
Just kidding! Jeff Becker has become one of the premier petitioners in the Constitution Party and we are extremely proud of him for that and for his leadership of the Constitution Party of West Virginia which has made teriffic progress in the last couple of years.
The ENG I majored in was engineering, not English.
:))
To match signatures is tough. On my job I have had to recently sign about 90 forms and as I am in a hurry, it does not look like my normail signature. people at state fairs or the mall probably don’t try to make their signature match perfectly what is their normal sig. I am hoping that the precedent set in Utah (being able to sign petitions online) will gain momentum…