A lawsuit filed against the Washington Secretary of State—Vet Voice Foundation v. Hobbs—claims that signature matching has prevented 170,000 eligible voters from casting ballots in the last 7 years alone, but has not once resulted in a conviction for voter fraud. by Kendall Turner “Consistent penmanship is not a constitutional prerequisite to vote in Washington State.” That’s the opening line of a lawsuit that’s being discussed by Washington’s Supreme Court today.  As roughly 2 million people in Washington prepare to fill in their ballot, sign and seal their envelope, and vote by mail in the closest and most expensive election in history, the state’s Supreme Court is gearing up to decide a question you might assume it had already settled: should your signature be allowed to deprive you of the right to vote? A lawsuit filed against the Washington Secretary of State—Vet Voice Foundation v. Hobbs—claims that signature matching has prevented 170,000 eligible voters from casting ballots in the last 7 years alone, but has not once resulted in a conviction for voter fraud. In other words, “it’s a remarkably ineffective tool for” protecting the integrity of elections, but “it’s an incredibly effective tool if your goal is to disenfranchise voters by the tens of thousands,” says Kevin Hamilton, one of the lawyers representing the voters and advocacy groups that filed the suit. Washington is among a small minority of states that automatically sends mail-in ballots to all registered voters. Voters can complete and sign these ballots and return them by official drop box or by mail, then election officials get to work processing their ballots. To verify the authenticity of mail-in ballots, Washington uses “signature matching,” which is exactly what it sounds like: Election officials compare the signature on the ballot against the voter’s registration record. If the signatures match, great—their vote counts. But if they don’t match, the ballot is discarded unless the voter takes additional steps to prove their identity, which about half of voters don’t do. In his legal filings, Washington’s Secretary of State Steve Hobbs describes signature matching is the ‘linchpin’ of Washington's vote-by-mail system” because it allows “the State to grant the broadest possible access to the ballot while maintaining and assuring the public about the integrity of the election.” (He declined to comment for this piece.) The folks at King County Elections agree with Hobbs’s position. “It’s really important that we're super thoughtful about both security and voter access,” says Kendall LeVan Hodson, the Chief of Staff at the King County Elections. “How do you balance those two things?"  Right now, the tool that Washington State has devised is signature matching. But not everyone agrees that signature matching strikes the right balance—which brings us back to the case in front of the Supreme Court. In 2022, several advocacy groups—Vet Voice Foundation, The Washington Bus, and El Centro De La Raza—and individual voters sued Hobbs, the King County Elections director, and members of the King County Canvassing Board, claiming that signature matching violates the Free and Equal Elections Clause of the Washington State Constitution by depriving people of their vote based solely on poor penmanship.  Signature matching is an imperfect way to validate ballots because there are all sorts of reasons why a voter’s signature might not look the same every time: Maybe the voter has Parkinson’s or another disease that limits control over their movements. Maybe the voter has a pretty signature that they sign when they have time, and a “hurry-up” signature that they sign when they don’t. Maybe they’re young and still figuring out what they want their signature to look like. (Not to mention Gen Z and Gen Alpha voters who have never even had to sign a check before.) And, according to Hamilton, there’s no real science to validating signatures. He says the election officials verifying voters’ signatures in Washington “have, at best, 2 or 3 hours of training,” and “use what you would call the ‘eyeball test.’” King County Election officials, however, describe the training as more robust and annually renewed, and say they adopted anti-bias training in 2021 to minimize ballot rejections that may stem from voters signing their names differently due to disability or lack of familiarity with the English language. The dispute over signature matching hasn’t gone to trial yet. Instead, the trial judge handling the case—King County Superior Court Judge Mark Larrañaga—asked the Washington Supreme Court to weigh in on two questions of law that will affect how (and whether) a trial is conducted: First, how much should courts hold the government’s feet to the fire when voters challenge a practice that restricts ballot access? Is it enough for the government to offer some rational explanation for the practice, or must the government provide a very compelling reason before courts will bless ballot restrictions? In other words, how much should Washington really care about protecting the right to vote? And second, once the appropriate standard is identified, is one side of this case so clearly right that no trial is needed? The Supreme Court’s decision will almost certainly not come in time to affect next week’s election, but “the decision that the Supreme Court reaches in this case could potentially have far-reaching consequences for the way that Washington State runs its elections more generally,” says Lisa Manheim, a professor at University of Washington’s School of Law. “The reason why is that the Court is trying to figure out how closely it should be looking at measures that Washington State puts into place that may make it more difficult for eligible voters to cast a ballot and have it counted.” The case has consequences not just for the future of Washington elections, but also for voting rights cases that are litigated nationally. In previous decades, many challenges to state voting practices were brought in federal court and were premised on federal law. But as federal courts (and the U.S. Supreme Court in particular) have become less protective of the right to vote, many voting rights challenges are—like this one—now being brought in state court and premised only on state law. “We are entering the early stages of an era in which state courts are likely to be the primary guardians of a lot of different constitutional and civil rights, including voting rights,” says Andrew Garber, a counsel at the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program. (Garber and his colleagues filed an amicus—or “friend of the court”—brief in the case before the Washington Supreme Court. They didn’t take a position on signature matching specifically, but urged the Court to adopt a rigorous standard for evaluating voting restrictions generally.) “This is a real opportunity for the Washington Supreme Court to set out a marker that it’s going to really protect voting rights,” Garber adds. “That’s an important thing nationally because Washington has a Free and Equal Elections Clause in its Constitution. A lot of states have similar ones in their constitutions. If a state like Washington takes the lead and says ‘this means what it says; it’s an important protection and we will make sure the courts in this state enforce that protection,’ that’s a lead other states can follow. They can show that it works.”