Federal Judge Gives Florida Voters Until Saturday to Correct Signature Problems

Florida voters whose mail-in and provisional ballots were rejected because their signatures didn’t match state records have been handed two more days to sort the problem after a ruling by a federal judge early Thursday. More than 4,000 ballots across 45 counties in Florida were disqualified because of inconsistent signatures, wrote Judge Mark Walker of the U.S. District Court in Tallahassee, who gave voters until Saturday to sort out the problem. The decision came hours ahead of a Thursday afternoon deadline for statewide election officials to complete a machine recount. “The precise issue in this case is whether Florida’s law that allows county election officials to reject vote-by-mail and provisional ballots for mismatched signatures—with no standards, an illusory process to cure, and no process to challenge the rejection—passes constitutional muster,” Walker wrote. “The answer is simple. It does not.”