We the People AZ Alliance (WPAA) issued a video earlier this month going over problems with the signature verification on ballot affidavits from the botched 2020 election.
The alliance has been investigating voting irregularities in Maricopa County in recent elections.
WPAA found that out of 1.9 million ballots, 10 percent or about 200,000 had “egregiously” mismatched signatures, and another 10 percent had poorly matched signatures that violated the state’s guidelines for acceptance.
Super great show!
Shelby & Chris drop a lot of nuggets a long the way. It’s worth watching the whole thing before the next show.
What they reveal is a big deal!
Here are some snippets to share around, but it by no means all of the discussion that needs to be heard.
Clip 1:… https://t.co/nu5yhuxEzH pic.twitter.com/t9DJ8GVlAe
— AzPinkLady #SaveArizona #SaveAmerica (@AzPinkLady) April 8, 2025
Attorney Bryan Blehm, a member of WPAA who previously represented Kari Lake in her election challenges, said during the presentation that then-Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer didn’t do anything to stop signature reviewers from clicking “approved” on every signature verification screen as fast as a new screen came up. He noted that 20,000 ballots that came in after the election was over violated the law.
“The big concern is who has access to a large number of these ballots, that can then be illegally voted,” Blehm said. “And we know, Stephen Richard wasn’t doing his job. We know they hire people, and they’ve consistently hired people that sit there to just hit enter, enter, enter.”
WPAA asked the Arizona State Senate for permission to inspect images of 120,000 ballot affidavit envelopes that were examined during the State Senate’s audit of the 2020 election. They were provided far more, 1.9 million images, as well as 5.3 million reference images, allowing the group to redo signature verification for the entire election.
Chris Handsel, director of IT and data for WPAA, said, “We gave everybody the same training that was in the signature verification manual that was given to the county, and we had our people redo signature verification just the way it was instructed by the county.”
Shelby Busch, co-founder of WPAA, pointed out that A.R.S. 16-550 states that ballots may not be accepted after 7 p.m. on Election Day. Part of the statute provides, “If the signature is missing, the county recorder or other officer in charge of elections shall make reasonable efforts to contact the elector, advise the elector of the missing signature and allow the elector to add the elector’s signature not later than 7 p.m. on Election Day.”
Busch added, “There is no provision to cure that or make it better, aside from actually having it signed, or having the voter go into the polling center, and we found several unsigned ballots that were uncured and counted. … In addition, we found many that were signed by somebody completely other than the voter. … We found scribbles and X’s and illegible and inconsistent swirls, and marks that weren’t constituting signatures that were inconsistent with special election policy, violating [state law].”
She added, “We found many duplicate voters, and yes, it can happen regardless of what the county tells you, people can vote more than once in the election, and there are many different ways that that can occur.”
Busch displayed several screenshots of “egregious signature matches.” She said at least 10 percent of them, 200,000 ballots, “should never have been counted.”
Handsel said another 10 percent weren’t as egregiously mismatched, “but they failed the secondary state standards according to the manual … 20 percent … they should have been at least questioned.” The group displayed several signatures that didn’t appear to match, and Busch said some of those might have been curable, since the mismatch could have just been due to someone’s handwriting deteriorating with age. However, they were not cured but approved without any curing.
Next, WPAA addressed the fast signature verification speeds, which the group previously exposed as being conducted at “world record speed.” Busch, who had requested the file used for signature verification, displayed videos of election workers clicking through signatures at a rate of only 2 seconds per comparison. “If you do the math on this, it just doesn’t seem possible, does it?” she asked.
“Mail-in balloting as a whole, I believe, personally, is criminal,” she said. “It’s truly criminal, and I think that it is a number one way that our elections are subverted.”
Handsel added, “There’s been the opinion for years on both sides of the aisle that mail-in voting is the easiest way to cheat.”
The group displayed video clips from Maricopa County’s ballot drop boxes prior to the 2022 election, showing individuals dropping off large numbers of ballots. In one video, a man can be seen getting out a box full of ballots. In other videos, individuals were observed after dropping off the ballots, handling more ballots in their vehicles, which led Busch and Handsel to speculate that they might be heading to another drop box. Additionally, the pair noted that almost every individual wore a mask, even though COVID-19 had ended. A video of election workers retrieving the ballots showed none wearing masks.
Arizona’s strict ballot harvesting law only allows family members, household members, or caregivers of the voter to return their ballots.
Busch noted that the election workers didn’t seal the box of ballots after they removed them from the drop box, but wheeled the pallet into the elections building, where it sat unattended in a hallway for over two hours.
The group stated that the county claims signature verification will catch the fraudulent ballots from ballot harvesting at drop boxes, citing a video clip of one of the county’s attorneys making this assertion.
“Even if there were 500,000 ballots somehow injected into the process, every ballot received by Maricopa County is processed, checked out against the voter registration record to make sure the person hasn’t already voted, and then verified by a multi-level signature review process,” the attorney said. “There’s no evidence or even reason to believe that it had any effect on the number of votes lawfully counted.”
WPAA displayed a quote from Richer claiming, “Mail-in voting is safe, secure, and valid.”
Handsel reviewed the lack of a chain of custody for ballots from the Post Office. He said the Post Office doesn’t even scan them like they do with regular mail, nor does the Post Office count them. He said county employees pick them up without counting them either, then drop them off at the third-party ballot processing vendor, Runbeck Election Systems. Only after they’re dropped off at Runbeck are they counted. Runbeck scans the ballot signature affidavits on the envelopes, then sends the images to Maricopa County Elections for signature verification.
Handsel explained how the first 1.2 million signatures that were verified appeared to be devoid of fraud, due to realistic processing times and approval rates around 80 percent. It wasn’t until the last 700,000 that were processed that WPAA saw problems with the signature verification.
He said taking 6 to 12 seconds to compare signatures was “conscientious,” which they saw in the early verification. This is because their trained volunteers took about that same amount of time, although some took as long as 30 seconds.
The group focused on the divergent results. “User 21” averaged an 80 percent pass rate, which was consistent with their volunteers. Whereas “User 12” took an average of 2 seconds, with a pass rate of 99 percent. Similarly, “User 134” took an average of 2.4 seconds to review a signature with a pass rate of 99 percent.
Handsel expressed his frustration that managers could be seen in video coverage walking by the speedy clickers and didn’t correct them. “And the fact that they’re sitting right next to each other [clicking at different speeds] ought to be obvious to the manager … to correct these but the fact is that management did not disapprove of this kind of signature verification practice,” he said.
Busch concluded, “You could always trust your election department to play and ridicule anyone who chose to question them.”
Blehm recommended one fix for the problem: “What I think really needs to happen is … Maricopa County [needs] to purge all of those signatures from the voter registration database and simply use the one the voter [provides] when they register to vote.”
Previous research by WPAA and other groups found that many voters had dramatically different signatures provided in previous elections, which many suspect were falsified.
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter / X. Email tips to [email protected].
