Mail ballot signature verification rejects Hispanic voters' ballots at 2.6x the rate of white voters, and research shows evaluator bias—not handwriting differences—is the primary driver

In Florida, mail ballots cast by Hispanic voters face a rejection risk 2.6 times that of white voters. In North Carolina, the rejection risk for Black voters is three times that of white voters. In Georgia, Asian voters' mail ballots are flagged at nearly three times the rate of white voters' ballots. These are not small margins on a rare event—in the 2016 and 2018 elections combined, over 750,000 mail ballots were rejected nationally, with non-matching signatures accounting for about a third of all rejections. Each rejected ballot is a citizen who went through the process of requesting, completing, and mailing a ballot, only to have their vote silently discarded. A 2026 study published in State Politics & Policy Quarterly used a controlled experiment where volunteers were randomly assigned to sign either a Latino-coded or White-coded name, ensuring that the racialized name was not linked to the signer's actual background. This eliminated the possibility that cultural or demographic differences in handwriting could explain the gap. The result: signature evaluators were significantly more likely to reject Hispanic-named signature pairs compared to White-named ones. The study concluded that evaluator bias—not voter-side factors—is the primary driver of racial disparities in mail ballot signature verification. A separate study in the American Journal of Political Science found that election workers are more likely to wrongly reject valid ballots than to correctly reject invalid ones, meaning the system's error rate tilts toward disenfranchisement. This problem persists because signature verification is inherently subjective—there is no national standard for what constitutes a "match," and training for the workers who make these calls varies wildly by jurisdiction. Some counties give evaluators a few hours of training; others give them days. Some use automated signature matching software as a first pass; others rely entirely on human judgment. The ballot curing process—which lets voters fix a rejected ballot—exists in only 33 states, and the rules differ so dramatically (Arizona says "make reasonable efforts to contact," California requires notification "a minimum of eight days prior to certification") that whether your vote counts after a false rejection depends heavily on where you live.