TEXAS – With more Americans than ever voting by mail in 2020, concern that legitimate votes may be thrown out over a signature is at the top of a lot of minds.

“Here’s the letter. It said that my ballot was denied. My vote didn’t count,” said Texas voter Rosalie Weisfeld, holding up her rejected vote notice.

In 2019, Weisfeld voted in a runoff election for a city position in her hometown of Allen, Texas. She was out of town for a family graduation during the election, but still wanted her voice to be heard.

She says she’s never skipped a chance to vote – ever.

“As a citizen, I take the right to vote very seriously,” she said. “I’ve voted in every single election as long as I can remember; for 40 years!”

Last year she registered to vote absentee and sent her ballot in well before the deadline. It wasn’t until more than a week after the election that she got that bad news: her vote had been denied due to her signature on the mail-in envelope.

“‘It was determined that the signature on the application for a ballot by mail and carrier envelope was not signed by the same person,’” said Weisfeld, reading the letter. “It was! It was my ballot. I had requested it. I had signed for it.”

When voters send in their ballots, they’re asked to put it in a privacy envelope with a larger envelope they have to sign on the outside. The signature is then used to verify that the person casting the mail-in votes is the actual voter who requested the ballot.

A bipartisan panel then compares the signature on the envelop to the voter’s signatures on file, usually the form that was used to request the mail-in ballot.

However, the panel comparing the signatures isn’t necessarily made up of handwriting experts, just people from each party trying to make their best determination on whether the signature is a match.

Susan Abbey, a Dallas-based forensic document examiner, is an expert on the science of handwriting. She matches signatures for court cases for a living.

“In my work I like to have as many as 20, [or] even more signatures for comparison purposes,” said Abbey.

She needs so many samples because she says signatures often change. A lot of factors come into play when you put ink to paper, and those factors can result in changes to how your signature ultimately turns out.

“Some people are very affected by their emotions, or health problems can make a big difference. If you’re taking medication — you haven’t taken your medication,” she said.

Abbey demonstrated to Spectrum News 1 how a simple change in seating posture can change the slant of a signature. She says even the time of day you sign could lend to changes in the final product.

Signatures also change over time and some people use different variations for different situations, like adding a middle initial or a simple scribble at the grocery store checkout.

In other words: the signature on the ballot envelope, even though it’s from the same person, may look different for a variety of reasons.

So how big of a problem is it?

A representative with the Denton County Elections Office said that every election, voters not providing a similar enough signature to match tends to be the biggest error they come across in the mail-in voting process.

A representative with the League of Women Voters of Dallas said they’ve found that mail-in ballots arriving late tend to result in more lost votes than the signature match, but that votes are lost to bad signatures nonetheless. However, they said the signature match panels they’ve been part of want votes to count as much as possible and tend to be understanding of minor differences.

While the overall percentage of votes lost to bad signature matches seems to be fairly low, votes are certainly lost and many mail-in voters are affected each election cycle.

Weisfeld found though that the bigger issue was not having a way to fix the problem.

When she received her notice that her vote was thrown out, it was too late; the votes had been counted and she wasn’t offered an opportunity to confirm that it was her signature on the envelope.

Weisfeld was recently a part of a lawsuit to allow voters in Texas a curing period to get ballots wrongly thrown out on signature mismatches counted, but the most recent ruling came against her and her fellow plaintiffs.

There are some ways to help ensure your vote isn’t thrown out for the same reason. Abbey recommends trying to stick to one signature style for official documents like those involved with voting.

She and other voting experts also recommend taking a picture of your mail-in ballot request form so you know how you signed that document and can try to match it as closely as possible when you send in your actual ballot.

Weisfeld said she’s still not sure what the match panel felt changed in her signature; if she made a loop she doesn’t normally do or something else. However, she said she plans to keep fighting to get a curing period for future mail-in voters.

“I was so sad in the beginning I started crying and then I got mad,” said Weisfeld. “To be denied my right to vote without any opportunity to correct it was – it hurt me very deeply, it hurt me extremely deeply.”