It appears that in addition to gerrymandering, filing lawsuits to stop the counting of ballots, requiring forms of ID that minority voters are less likely to have and closing polling locations in minority precincts, the GOP has found a new form of voter suppression: requiring matching signatures.
A study by the ACLU found that younger voters, who live in a digital age where they're rarely required to write in cursive, have often not developed identifiable signatures. The study found that Florida, which uses signatures as its main means of identifying voters, has thrown out at least 20,000 ballots during this election, about half of them due to signature mismatches.
Given that Republicans have disenfranchised young people, minorities, women and independents, it seems that their only hope for winning elections is increasingly through voter suppression, by whatever means they can manage to pull it off.
Blair Bateman, Provo
Donate to the newsroom now. The Salt Lake Tribune, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) public charity and contributions are tax deductible