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Tuesday, Feb. 8, is the voting deadline for Washington’s February special election. We’ll be voting on school levies, which are important, but this election can serve another function too – as a test of whether your signature still works.

How a napkin can be counted as a vote in Washington

I looked at the ballot statistics, and already, statewide, 7,470 special election ballots are being challenged, most of them in King and Snohomish counties. Of those 7,470 challenged ballots, 2,893 had no signature at all, and 3,851 had a signature that didn’t match. Because, as you know, by law, they have to check.

If your signature is missing or doesn’t match, your ballot can’t get counted until the elections department sends you a signature form and waits for you to return it, or, you go to the election office and fill out a new signature form which then must match what’s on your envelope.

This takes time, and as the signature corrections trickle in and these votes get counted, the results keep changing.

Given that mail-in voting is under the microscope, it would help if more people could get their signatures right the first time.

I noticed in this year’s ballot package, included a paragraph reminding us that while the signature doesn’t have to be in cursive, or even legible, the style does have to match whatever you scribbled on your voter registration form, or it’s going to get challenged and slow down the count.

And if you’ve forgotten how your own signature looks – which I know can happen – they suggest you look at your driver’s license to refresh your memory before signing the ballot envelope.

Maybe the problem is that with schools dropping cursive, people are just improvising each time they sign something. And if that’s the case, please – teachers – could you at least teach enough cursive so that everyone can sign their ballots consistently?

I keep hearing democracy is at stake – and this isn’t helping. So, even if you don’t care about school levies, find your ballot, sign the envelope, and send it in – if for no other reason than as a rehearsal, to see if your signature still works.

And when the big election comes in November, we won’t be looking at tens of thousands of uncounted votes because people messed up their own names.

Listen to Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien weekday mornings from 5 – 9 a.m. on ³ÉÈËXÕ¾ Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.