WASHINGTON, DC – Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE) secured a massive win to restore the integrity of signature matching to authenticate mail-in ballots in Arizona last Friday, enhancing Arizona’s ability to trust its election results. In March, RITE sued the Arizona Secretary of State, challenging the state’s unlawful signature-match process. While state law requires county recorders to match mail-ballot signatures with signatures in the voter’s “registration record,” the Secretary instructed them to use a broader and less reliable universe of comparison signatures. That means the Secretary was requiring ballots to be counted despite using a signature that did not match anything in the voter’s registration record. This was a clear violation of state law.
On Friday, the Superior Court for the County of Yavapai agreed with RITE that the state is conducting signature matching in an unlawful manner. The court said that the “statute is clear and unambiguous” and that “the legislature intended for the recorder to attempt to match the signature on the outside of the envelope to the signature on the documents the putative voter used to register.” The court found that the Secretary’s signature-match process unlawfully “contradicts the plain language” of the statute by permitting signature comparison with documents that have “nothing to do with the act of registering.”
“RITE will build on this victory to continue to fight in court for elections that are administered according to democratically enacted laws, not illegal partisan commands. This is a huge victory toward securing the elections that Arizonans deserve, which are elections they can trust.”– Derek Lyons, President and CEO of RITE
As RITE has repeatedly argued, in court and through public comment, the Arizona Secretary of State must change his procedures before the next election so that signature matching can protect the integrity of Arizona’s mail-in balloting process. If he does not do so on his own, RITE is confident that the court will order him to do just that.
