Reaction to a New York State plan to collect and transmit voter registration data demonstrates how misinformation can prevent improvement of registration in the United States. The DMV pilot program in Albany and Orange Counties would place terminals in DMV locations in which voter registration could be inputted. The information, including a digital scan of a wet signature, would be transmitted electronically to boards of election. Boards currently receive hard copies of registration materials.
The reactions of election officials, who mistakenly believed that signatures would be collected on a touchscreen before being transmitted electronically, demonstrates some of the misconceptions about the technology. One county official said that “I think that it opens the door for fraud, plain and simple.” Another supported the use of only wet signatures by calling them “time-tested.”
As FELN detailed in its “Mobile Voter Registration” report, electronic signatures are a more secure and less expensive alternative to the old model of paper-only signature collection. Handwritten electronic signatures offer benefits that even inked signatures do not. The report discusses some of the following reasons why modernization of voter registration should include the use of electronic signatures.
- Touchscreen technology makes it possible to collect data points throughout the signing process – like a mini-video – and encode these data in the electronic file sent to election officials. If officials need to, they can examine this data for verification purposes.
- Electronic signature can be rendered tamper-proof, such that any effort to alter the signature would immediately corrupt the data file.
- Three states – Delaware, Kansas and Rhode Island – already accept electronic signatures for voter registration forms and there has been no evidence of security or comparison problems.
- Voters will control their handwritten electronic signature. If they do not like the appearance of a signature on the voter registration form, they can erase it and start over before they submit it to election officials.
- Handwritten signatures on new voter registration forms will be more current than the signature captured by online registration systems from driver’s licenses, which may be years old.
In addition, electronic signatures have been used widely in the commercial world for more than a decade. The FELN report also describes the security and cost advantages of moving to a digital voter registration system generally. Go to FELN’s Mobile Voters page for more information on this topic.