With Kari Lake's legal complaint alleging systematic signature verification failures in Maricopa County remanded by the Arizona Supreme Court to trial court, closer examination of the signature verification software used by the county reveals a strikingly low threshold for signatures to qualify as "High-confidence" matches.
According to 2020 emails between Maricopa County officials and an employee of the county's election technology vendor, Runbeck Election Services, the election firm's Verus Pro application for signature verification ranks signature matches on a scale of 0 to 100.
A July 2022 contract extension between Maricopa County and Runbeck explains how the signature verification program scores signature matches.
Signatures sent to Runbeck "Are assigned a score," reads the contract, "Based on the verification; signatures with a score of 10 or higher are routed to a high-confidence manual signature verification queue, and signatures with a lower score are routed to a low-confidence signature verification queue."
"If the signature is inconsistent with the elector's signature on the elector's registration record," reads Arizona statute 16-550, "The county recorder or other officer in charge of elections shall make reasonable efforts to contact the voter, advise the voter of the inconsistent signature and allow the voter to correct or the county to confirm the inconsistent signature."
Maricopa County has yet to respond to follow-up questions about what voters must do to confirm or cure their signature or what the county uses Verus Pro for since its current contract with Runbeck says it's for signature verification.
The trial court judge, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson, had set a schedule to reexamine the signature verification issue after the Arizona Supreme Court remanded the case to him, but he rescinded his order after the high court set its schedule for considering sanctions.
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