By Vince Phillips
In previous letters I have looked at signature rejection rates and the limited training given to election judges. Another important factor deserves attention: major societal changes have quietly made signature verification more difficult, especially for younger voters.The turning point came around 2010 with the adoption of Common Core standards. Many states, including Colorado, dropped cursive handwriting as a required subject in elementary schools. As a result, millions of Millennials and Gen Z voters were never taught cursive and often developed printed or inconsistent signatures.This has become a nationwide issue wherever mail-in voting is heavily used:
- In Nevada’s 2024 election, over 13,000 mail ballots were rejected for signature mismatches, with officials noting a large share involved younger voters.
- In California, voters aged 18–24 have experienced mail-ballot rejection rates three times higher than the statewide average, largely due to signature issues.
- Similar patterns have appeared in Washington, Georgia, Florida, and other states.
The only real safeguard for these mail ballots is the signature comparison performed by minimally trained election judges. When a young voter’s current signature no longer matches the one they provided years earlier on their voter registration or driver’s license, the ballot is flagged, or worse, it slips through under the “default to count” rule when judges disagree.
The Future Meets the Present
With the proliferation of electronic devices, constant typing, texting, and voice control, handwriting itself is becoming increasingly rare. Some experts suggest that writing by hand may eventually go the way of the dodo bird. While more than two dozen states have recently reinstated cursive instruction, partly for historical literacy and practical problems with legal documents and voting, this resurgence is largely a stopgap.
An entire generation of students (roughly those born between 2000 and 2015) was largely skipped, and not all states are reversing the change. Colorado’s mail-ballot system was built for an earlier era when most voters learned cursive and maintained relatively consistent signatures. That era has passed. Yet our verification procedures and training standards have not been updated to match this new reality.
One unanswered question is whether election officials will eventually respond to the handwriting decline by quietly loosening verification standards or instructing judges to be more lenient with younger voters’ signatures. While no such policy shift has been publicly announced, the combination of minimal training, the “default to count” rule when judges disagree, and growing pressure to minimize rejections raises legitimate concerns about whether rigor will be sacrificed in the name of convenience and access.
A Personal Memory
Years ago, when voting in person, you stood before an election judge, presented identification, and signed the poll book right there in front of them. The judge could immediately compare your live signature to the one on file. If anything did not match, they could ask questions or require additional proof on the spot.
Today, that direct, redundant, in-person check has been replaced for most voters by a distant signature comparison performed days or weeks later by minimally trained volunteers, with no ability to clarify or challenge the signer in real time. This is a clear example of how societal changes created unintended stress on long-standing election safeguards. Officials shelved in-person voting, then tout signature verification as a cornerstone of security, even as our population evolves away from handwriting, thereby weakening its effectiveness.
Questions for Colorado:
- How has the statewide signature rejection rate trended by age group since 2010?
- What specific adjustments have been made to training and procedures to account for the post-cursive generation?
- Are we willing to adapt our verification standards to the reality that many younger voters were never taught the handwriting style the system was built around, especially since mail-in voting recently increased the importance of the signature verification as a security measure?
Societal change is constant. Our election processes should evolve with them through better training, clearer standards, improved data transparency, and honest acknowledgment of limitations. Pretending the old methods still work exactly as they did decades ago serve no one.
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