Signed, Sealed, Delivered—Then Discarded

Updated on October 21 at 5:47 p.m.

George Mangeni registered to vote as soon as he became a U.S. citizen in 2015. Mangeni, who immigrated from Kenya, always makes sure to cast a ballot in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, where he lives.

“It’s just something you do,” he told me. “You are given an opportunity to select people who make influence over your lives, and so it’s important you have a voice.”

This spring, with COVID-19 ravaging Ohio, he decided to cast his vote in the primary elections by mail for the first time. The instructions were straightforward enough, especially for a network engineer like Mangeni: He applied for a ballot, received it, marked it up, signed it, and prepared to submit it. As he got ready to post his ballot, though, Mangeni felt a pang and took a photograph of it. “I had a sinking feeling that something would happen,” he recalled. “I was like, I hope it gets counted.” But he sent the ballot to the board of elections, and didn’t worry about it anymore.

[Read: What really scares voting experts about the Postal Service]

A couple of months later, he received a call from the ACLU of Ohio, informing him that his ballot had been rejected. “I was surprised twofold,” he said. “One, how the heck did they find out? And then, why was it not counted?”

The answer, it turned out, was that Mangeni’s signature on the ballot didn’t match the one he used when he registered to vote. Ohio, like 30 other states, uses signature matching as a fraud-prevention measure. Mangeni sometimes uses different signatures, and he didn’t recall which one he had used to register. Under Ohio law, election officials are supposed to mail a notice to any voter whose ballot is rejected,