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Jared Gordon's avatar

California already follows a similar procedure, but uses county employees (almost always registrar staff) to do the human screening. There's an internal second review by more experienced and better trained supervisors, but no partisan citizen involvement or judicial involvement.

Where this system breaks down is in the ease of passing signatures by the first person that are at best uncertain without further review. I've watched tens of thousands of signatures get examined over weeks of processing, and most of the time most of the election workers were fair and pretty close to my judgment on almost all the signatures. But I did observe one staffer who was letting signatures go by that were clear non-matches, like printed signatures on the envelope when the original signature was in stylized cursive. I noted a bunch of his errors and emailed the Registrar about it. The staffer was reassigned to other election duties the next day. But there dozens of uncertain or nonmatch signature ballots that were sent to be opened and counted as a result of that one staffer's lack of attention or motivated decision-making, and once they're in the to-be-counted bins you can't readily go back and question them.

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MM's avatar
Oct 29Edited

Yes it's better than existing procedures.

It doesn't fix the ward heeler standover problem, but then I'm not sure anything fixes that if you allow absentee voting in the first place. The voting booth was designed to prevent that problem by explicitly separating the voter from the heeler in front of witnesses, preventing both pressure from the heeler and the voter being able to prove that he voted "properly".

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