Elections officials found dubious signatures on Matos' nomination papers. Did the system work?

Did the system to determine which candidates have rightfully earned a spot on the ballot work – or fail – when a campaign worker for Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos turned in reams of dubious signatures?

On one hand, elections officials in Jamestown immediately suspected fraud and notified the police after discovering that multiple people who supposedly signed one petition had been dead for years. Other communities tossed out hundreds of invalid signatures, though they weren't so quick to involve the authorities.

On the other hand, several people whose purported signatures were deemed valid by elections officials in Newport and Barrington later told WPRI-TV that they'd never signed Matos' nominating papers and that the signatures weren't theirs. State officials nonetheless determined that Matos qualified for a spot on the ballot, without re-examining all the signatures that her congressional campaign turned in.

"I would submit that the system worked in part, and the system failed in another part," said John Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island.

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The system worked in Jamestown because the Board of Canvassers "did their required diligence" and "blew the whistle," Marion said. But the system didn't work in communities that didn't sufficiently scrutinize signatures, and only began to do so once the media began asking questions.

And, Marion said, "it also failed when the Board of Elections chose not to scrutinize all of Matos’ signatures."

The process of validating a candidate's nominating papers is one of those things that "only makes the news when things go wrong," Marion observed. Here's a look at how it works – and where experts and election watchers see room for improvement.

Who checks the signatures on a candidate's nominating papers?

Signatures collected by candidates are reviewed by local officials in each municipality. The process involves both the office staff who administer elections and each community's politically appointed board of canvassers.

Exactly what that looks like can vary: Larger communities might have an elections department (often called the "canvassing authority") with multiple full-time staff members. But in a small town, the person reviewing petitions could be a clerk who's also in charge of other tasks, such as processing birth certificates, Marion said.

The board of canvassers must have at least three members – and no more than two can belong to the same political party. It's designed to be a bipartisan body, where both parties are "keeping an eye on each other," Marion said.

In Exeter, members of the canvassing board look at all the signatures that come in, according to Mary B. Hall, the board's chair. They're paid a small stipend, and they work alongside the town's elections administrator, she said.

In large communities like Cranston and Providence, clerks do the work of determining which signatures are valid. At least two board members have to certify the results, but they're only confirming that the count is correct – not necessarily looking at the signatures themselves, elections officials say.

In most states, election administration takes place at the county level, and tasks like signature verification are overseen by county clerks. But Rhode Island doesn’t have county government and there isn’t the same level of professionalization, Marion said.

That means that the work of validating signatures is carried out by officials in 39 different cities and towns who may all have their own approach and aren’t necessarily adhering to the same standards.

“We don’t have as much infrastructure for educating and supervising local election administrators as exists in other states,” Marion said. And right now, the degree to which signatures are scrutinized “seems to be left up to local boards of canvassers,” he said.

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What does the process look like?

Election officials in every city and town have access to a statewide database known as the Central Voter Registry System (CVRS), said Mike Narducci, Providence's administrator of elections.

Using that system, workers look up each individual whose name appears on a candidate's nominating papers and toss anyone who isn't registered to vote or doesn't live in the district.

If a voter has died, the database should indicate that their voter registration has been canceled, Narducci said. Local election officials are notified about deaths by the secretary of state's office, which gets that information from the Department of Health and the national Social Security death file, according to spokeswoman Faith Chybowski.

Officials also automatically reject any signatures from voters who are registered in a different town – for instance, if you're registered to vote in East Providence, your signature won't count on forms submitted in Barrington.

The next step is to make sure that the signature on the petition resembles what's on file in the CVRS, which draws from Division of Motor Vehicles records as well as voter registration forms.

But if the person who signed the papers wasn't eligible in the first place, "we don't even look at those signatures," Narducci said. And it's more common for signatures to be tossed out for eligibility reasons than issues with the graphic validity of the signatures themselves, he added.

Notably, state law doesn't require the signature on a candidate's nomination papers to be a perfect match. Instead, it says that a signature "shall be accepted as valid if it can be reasonably identified to be the signature of the voter it purports to be."

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And when a voter is handed a petition to sign outside the grocery store, or at a parade, there's chance that they will scribble down a sloppy, dashed-off version.

"That signature could have been done in a rush, it could have been done on a clipboard, in the rain," said Nick Lima, Cranston's election director. "There’s a lot of reasons why a signature is not going to be perfect, but it needs to be reasonably identifiable. And that’s not a difficult standard for people to grasp. But especially for newer elections officials and even ones that have been around for a while, it doesn’t hurt to get refresher training."

How do municipalities decide whether to toss invalid signatures or refer them to the police?

"It's a judgment call," Lima said. A petition might have 18 invalid signatures, but that doesn't necessarily mean there was fraud, he pointed out. Instead, it might indicate that the campaign worker gathered signatures from random people without ensuring that they were registered to vote or lived in the correct community.

Sloppy? Yes. Illegal? No.

On the other hand, a form with 15 signature mismatches would be a red flag, Lima said. "I don't think I've ever seen that on a form," he said. "That's extremely rare ... pretty much right away, we'd know there was something suspicious."

The problem, Marion said, is that standards aren't consistent from town to town.

In Jamestown, newly-hired Deputy Town Clerk Keith Ford alerted police after noticing that six out of 17 signatures on a petition submitted by the Matos campaign didn't match, and that at least three people had died years earlier. Meanwhile, in East Providence, officials rejected identical-looking signatures that purportedly came from all six members of the City Council, but didn't refer the matter to the law enforcement until reporters began asking questions.

"It’s clear that some communities understand how to review these signatures, and what to do if they suspect fraud," Marion said. "Other communities haven’t, and they need to be brought up to speed."

How can elections officials tell if a signature is fake?

Lima said local clerks with decades of experience will have looked at “hundreds of thousands of signatures, if not a million” over the course of their careers.

“They know, within a couple of seconds, if it’s valid or not,” he said. If there’s any doubt, they’ll look at additional signatures from that voter, and get an opinion from colleagues, he added.

For seasoned elections workers, it’s easy to tell if a voter’s handwriting has simply changed with age, Lima said. It’s also common to see signatures from the same politically active people show up again and again.

But there’s still room for improvement, he said. He’d like to see the state Board of Elections provide more regular training sessions for both new and experienced election workers, and perhaps even offer certification programs like other states do.

Doing so would help ensure that "statewide, we’re all following the same standards,” and that a signature that gets verified in one town wouldn’t be rejected in another, he said.

The Board of Elections does provide some training for elections officials – including a class taught by a former FBI forensic handwriting analyst, both Lima and Narducci noted. But through a spokesperson, the board declined to provide any information about how often trainings on signature verification take place or what they entail.

Is the same process used for mail ballots?

Yes and no. When voters apply for a mail ballot, their signatures are validated in the same way, Narducci said. But when the ballot gets completed and mailed in, it goes to the state Board of Elections rather than local officials.

Under state law, two people at the BOE have to review the signature on each mail ballot and agree that it matches what's on file in the CVRS. If they don’t agree, there’s a procedure that needs be followed, which includes at least two supervisors reviewing the signature.

Certifying mail ballots is “completely different” from validating nominating paper signatures, said Stephen Erickson, who formerly served as the BOE’s vice chairman.

In his view, the latter serves a “gatekeeping function” – it determines who’s on the ballot, not the ultimate outcome of the election. As a result, he said, it’s “less strict than the process for ensuring that ballots are properly cast.”

To skeptics, though, there’s the same underlying problem.

“The Matos signature scandal revealed a real weakness in our election system: its dependence on the verification of a large number of signatures in a short amount of time by the fallible human eye,” said Rhode Island Republican National Committeeman Steve Frias.

“Signature verification is subjective, and prone to human error,” Frias said. He added: “The high volume of mail ballot applications and mail ballots, and the short amount of time to review them means fraudulent signatures can go unnoticed.”

Two local boards of canvassers “accepted five forged signatures on nomination papers as valid,” which only came to light once the media learned about the signatures of dead voters that had been flagged in Jamestown, Frias noted.

But elections officials point out that hundreds of other signatures were rejected for various reasons – and say that’s proof the system works.

"Did a few get through? Yes," Secretary of State Gregg Amore said in an interview. "That’s not good. But it’s not widespread."

Why is Matos still on the ballot?

Even though local election officials rejected about 30% of the signatures that the Matos campaign submitted, roughly 720 were accepted. Candidates needed only 500 to qualify for a spot on the ballot.

It’s unclear how many of those 720 signatures would hold up to scrutiny. But officials seem to be operating under the assumption that Matos had a large enough cushion.

“I’m confident that the Matos campaign received the 500 signatures needed to access the ballot,” Secretary of State Gregg Amore told The Providence Journal. Although reporters have located a few people who say their signatures were faked, “I’m not aware of that being a widespread issue,” he said.

Once signatures are validated on the local level, the secretary of state’s job is to certify the count – “basically, confirming that the number of signatures on each sheet matches what has been reported by the board of canvassers,” Chybowski said – and then print the ballots.

But as Rhode Island Republican National Committeeman Steve Frias pointed out on Twitter, state law also allows the secretary of state to determine if “the nomination papers or the signatures on them are invalid or insufficient,” and disqualify candidates.

In an interview, Amore suggested that doing so would be inappropriate. “The last thing that we want an elected official like myself to do is to be determining the legitimacy of signatures,” he said, later adding that he thinks that the Board of Elections has the ability to conduct its own review.

It’s not clear that the Board of Elections agrees: After numerous inquiries, the board issued a statement saying that signature verification is conducted by local officials who “did their job.” Through its spokesman, Christopher Hunter, the board declined to explain why there was no attempt to re-examine Matos’ signatures after discrepancies emerged.

Stephen Erickson, who formerly served as the board’s vice chairman, argues that the board “functions, essentially, as a court” and that its job is to adjudicate appeals, not conduct investigations. But Marion contends that the law makes “crystal clear” that the board has the authority to review local officials’ work.

“Given all of the evidence from multiple communities that there were problems, they should have reviewed all of Matos’ signatures and come to an independent conclusion about whether she had submitted the required number of signatures,” he said.

Is the process too rushed?

Erickson suggested rethinking the “highly compressed” timeline. He pointed out that the final day for candidates to contest signatures was also the last day before the “drop-dead” deadline to mail primary ballots to military and overseas voters, or else run afoul of federal law.

“It’s a much more compressed process than with mail ballots, and that makes a difference in terms of how thoroughly certain things can be investigated,” he said.

Frias, similarly, said that requiring election officials to validate signatures in such a short amount of time “makes it difficult to catch fraudulent signatures.” He also suggested that extending the signature collection period would make it less likely that “a desperate campaign” would engage in fraud.

“Basically, candidates have less than two weeks to collect signatures and local boards have about a week after the filing deadline to review them,” Frias said. In other states, there’s more turnaround time, he said.

Election officials interviewed for this story also generally agree that it would help to have more time to verify signatures, though they don’t accept the notion that fraud is getting overlooked because the process is too rushed.

“I’m not sure it would have made a difference here,” Amore said. But, he added, “if the process is extended, it takes pressure off all of the stakeholders, and, I think, probably builds confidence.”

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Who checks signatures on nomination papers, mail ballots in Rhode Island?