Program analyzing signatures in Kari Lake case calls 10 percent match accurate!
County denies report.
PHOENIX, Arizona (PNN) - April 1, 2023 - A battle is raging over the way in which Arizona’s Maricopa County verifies that signatures on early ballots are genuine.
The issue is part of the legal battle being waged by Republican Kari Lake, who officially lost November’s gubernatorial election but in reality had the election stolen from her by Democrat Katie Hobbs. Part of Lake’s legal battle to have the results invalidated revolves around her well-supported claim that a vast gulf exists between the principle of signature verification as outlined in county policies and the actual practices employed in the 2022 election.
Lake said Friday that the county will not allow her team to inspect signatures.
Amid that debate, a new report from the website Just the News indicates that the technology employed by Maricopa County might not be very effective at catching fraudulent signatures.
The report said Maricopa County uses a service called Verus Pro that is part of the software offered by Runbeck Election Services, which has a contract with the county.
At that point, differences emerged. Maricopa County said signatures are verified using “calling, mailing, texting, and emailing the voters.”
The site said it was told by a county representative, “Maricopa County does not use Verus Pro for signature verification.”
However, Just the News said former Arizona Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Wright gave the site a copy of a contract effective last July between Maricopa County and Runbeck.
Signatures sent to Runbeck “are assigned a score 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,” the contract said.
That’s 10 on a scale of 0 to 100, the report said, citing 2020 emails between Maricopa County officials and a Runbeck employee. In other words, the software has high confidence that a signature that scores as low as 10 out of 100 is genuine.
