Orange County employs a new way to verify ballot signatures. Here’s how it works

Orange County election officials are deploying new technology this year to add an extra layer of confidence when tallying votes for the 2026 general election.

The new automatic signature verification software is similar to what financial institutions have used for decades to verify signatures on financial documents.

It scans the signature a voter provided on their ballot envelope and then compares that signature to all the ones already on file for that voter. If it determines with high confidence that there is a match, that envelope — and the ballot it contains — can continue onto the next step in what is a lengthy process to count votes.

In previous elections, photos of envelope signatures were sent to a team that would manually compare the signatures with the ones on file for that voter.

Human eyes take over now if the software isn’t confident there is a match.

Bob Page, Orange County’s registrar of voters, said his office implemented the new software ahead of the general election thanks to a $3.2 million infusion of state funding received in August. The added step in the vote-counting process will help quicken ballot processing times, Page said during a media tour of his office’s election procedures on Wednesday, Oct. 28, in Santa Ana.

Page said his office has been processing ballots as they’ve come in since early voting began at the beginning of October.

“We’re confident that we’ll have at least 90% of all the ballots that we’ve received will be in the first 8:05 p.m. results we post,” Page said.

In total, Page said his office has about 1,900 people hired for the Nov. 3 general election in Orange County. The office follows a process that includes more than 125 steps to ensure every election is accurate and secure, he said.

Every registered voter in California is mailed a ballot about a month before Election Day. In Orange County, nearly 2 million ballots were mailed out to voters.

Orange County voters can choose to mail their ballot back, place it in one of the 128 drop boxes scattered around the county, or vote in person at a vote center: 39 vote centers are already open, and another 152 will open Saturday, Oct. 31, Page said.

Here’s a look into what happens after the registrar’s office collects ballots and how they are prepared for processing and counting.

Ballots are scanned and sorted; signatures are checked — and checked again

After two-person teams pick up ballots from drop boxes — or after ballots are delivered from regional collection sites — ballots are first placed in mail sorters.

These scan the barcode on the return envelope to ensure that a voter isn’t attempting to vote multiple times.

The automatic signature verification software captures an image of the signature on that envelope and then compares it to the voter’s current signature in their registration file, Page said.

If the software determines that the signature on the envelope is a high-confidence match to what is on file for that voter, those envelopes go through a machine that shakes them  — to make the ballot sink to the bottom of the envelope — and slices them open. A worker then removes the ballot and checks that it hasn’t been sliced or damaged by the extracting machine.

But if the software determines that a signature is not a high-confidence match to what is on file — or if a signature is too basic, which the software automatically does not accept — that envelope goes to a team of election workers who manually verify that the signature is a match to what’s on file for that voter. This manual verification station reviews every signature that is in the voter’s file, Page said.

“Every time somebody returns an envelope, if we accept that signature, we are required to add that to the voter record as another signature or comparison in the next election, so voters have multiple signatures,” Page said. “Obviously, new voters, we may only have the signature they provided to the DMV on a touch pad, which may not look like how they sign it.”

The team looks for similarities, not exact matches, Page said. He encourages first-time voters to look at their driver’s license when they sign their return envelope, to avoid a challenge.

To challenge a signature, a team of three people must agree that there are significant enough differences between the signature on the ballot envelope and those on file. If that happens, the voter will be sent a first-class letter to let them know there is an issue, which can also happen if they forgot to sign their ballot envelope altogether.

For this election, voters have until Nov. 25 at 5 p.m. to cure — or correct — any signature issues. But if a signature is still deemed significantly different from what is on file, a ballot could be rejected and not counted, Page said.

Page said his office tested the new software with ballot envelopes received from the June 2 primary election, after the results were certified. This was done, Page said, to “figure out what we wanted to set the confidence score at for this election.”

The confidence score, based on a range from 1 to 100, was set at 60 for this year’s process, he said.

“We set a pretty conservative confidence level, because we didn’t want to have any false positives. We didn’t want it accepting signatures that we wouldn’t normally accept,” Page said. “In this first election (using the software), we’re kind of seeing how things go and set that number pretty high.”

Page said the team did not find any false positives in the test with ballots that had a score of at least 60.

More than 380,000 ballots have been returned as of Tuesday, Page said, and at least 70% have been sent to the review team for an additional look at a signature after going through the ASV software. Some potentially get a third, he said.

After activating the software, Page said his team has continued auditing a random selection of at least 2% of the ballot signatures run through the software. No false positives have been found through that testing either, he said.

Ballots are sorted — again — and prepared for tally room

Once signatures have been verified and ballots are removed from the envelopes, another team inspects the ballots and flattens them to remove creases before they are scanned.

Issues are flagged, such as if a ballot is damaged or if a voter circled their choice rather than filling in the bubbles. If an error is spotted, the ballot is sent to a team that duplicates ballots.

“State law says, even if a voter doesn’t follow the clear instructions about how to fill in the voting targets, if they do something else, like circle the name, or put a check next to a name, we still have to review that and potentially count that, as long as the voter’s intent is clear, and they consistently mark the ballot,” Page said.

If, for example, a voter fills in some choices correctly but circles candidates in other parts of the ballot, workers would deem that inconsistent, Page said.

“On that kind of ballot, we would probably only count the ones that are actually filled out properly,” he said.

Votes are counted

Once any issues are addressed and the ballot is scanned, it finally makes its way to the tally room.

Only about a half dozen people have keycard and door code access to the tally room, Page said.

Information from the scanned ballots is loaded onto a thumb drive, which is either hand-delivered to the tally room or sent in via pneumatic tube, like those used by bank drive-throughs. And the votes are added up.

The registrar’s office will first post early voting results at 8:05 p.m. on Nov. 3 on its website, ocvote.gov. The next set of results will then be posted at 9:30 p.m., with more results coming every 30 minutes until every vote center ballot is counted.

But there is potential for a last-minute change in reporting results, Page said.

Under a new state law that went into effect in September, county election officials can extend voting hours without having to go to a judge if some sort of law enforcement disruption has interrupted voting at a vote center.

“If any county in the state has disruption and has to extend their hours, that will mean … we will have to, when we post the results at 8:05, remove all state offices from the results, because that county is not done with its voting,” Page said. “If it’s a neighboring county — that we share a congressional district with or something else — that extends voting hours, we’ll have to remove that from the first reports until that county is done with their extended voting hours.”