Welch: The system is sound. The trust gap is the problem worth fixing.

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, August 5, 2026

A few years back, Washington’s state auditor pulled more than 7,200 ballot signatures at random and rechecked them by hand. According to that 2022 audit, the auditor agreed with the county call more than 98 percent of the time. Ballots were being accepted and rejected about the way they should be.

That is not the story a lot of people carry about mail voting. Let me lay out what the system does, where it is strong, where it is thin, and what we could change to make it harder to cheat and easier to trust.

Start with registration. When you sign up to vote here, you swear under penalty of perjury that you are a U.S. citizen. You do not hand over documents. That sounds loose until you learn it is the standard in roughly 40 states, according to Ballotpedia, and that federal law blocks states from demanding documents on the federal form. Washington is not the outlier. It is the norm.

Where we are unusual is that we vote entirely by mail. Your ballot comes to your door, you sign the envelope, you send it back. The identity check happens on the back end, where trained staff compare your envelope signature to the one on file, usually the one from your driver’s license. That back end is stronger than critics admit. The counting machines are air gapped. Everything is paper, so an audit or recount has something physical to touch. Every ballot gets a signature check and a duplicate check.

And the fraud everyone fears mostly is not there. In University of Washington research covering a decade of elections, only about half a percent of ballots get rejected for a mismatched signature. Forging a specific signature at scale, while facing perjury charges, is a bad plan with a small payoff.

The honest weakness is not an army of fake voters. It is that our whole identity guarantees rides on handwriting comparison and on a sworn statement no one checks up front. If you trust signature matching, the system looks secure. If you do not, that is the seam. Both views are held by serious people, and pretending otherwise loses the room.

Here is what should bother us more than fraud. That same UW research found roughly 40 percent of challenged ballots never get cured, and the burden falls hardest on young voters. In the 2022 general election, nearly 5 percent of ballots from voters aged 18 to 25 were rejected. Those are eligible citizens who did everything but dot one line, and their votes vanished.

We can fix the real problems without inventing fake ones. Close the cure gap: when a signature is challenged, counties should have to reach the voter by mail, email, text, and phone, with a window that runs past Election Day. Voters can help themselves too: at voter.votewa.gov you can confirm your registration, see the signature on file, and track your ballot to acceptance. Fix the late-ballot problem, which is about half of all rejections, with prepaid postage and more drop boxes where returns lag. Settle the harvesting question with facts: Washington does not cap who returns a sealed ballot, but signing or voting on someone else’s behalf is already illegal, the signature check runs no matter who drops it off, and drop boxes follow a two-person, sealed-container chain of custody. A collector cannot vote your ballot. The real risks, coercion and undelivered ballots shrink when we bar per-ballot pay and let voters track their own ballots. And make the strongest audit the standard one. Under RCW 29A.60.185, counties must audit before certifying, but a risk-limiting audit, the gold standard that confirms the winner actually won, is only one option they can choose. Make it the statewide default and publish the results every cycle.

We can argue about all of this, and we should. Reasonable people disagree with mail voting and where access and security meet. But the evidence does not support the story of large-scale fraud. Every group that has gone looking- canvassing boards, the state auditor, researchers, activists on both sides- keeps finding numbers too small to move an election. That does not mean we stop watching. And watching is not only the government’s job. Get educated on the candidates instead of the loudest post in your feed. Confirm your registration and track your own ballot. If something looks wrong, report it to your county elections office instead of shouting it online.

Washington already runs one of the highest-turnout, best-audited systems in the country. The goal is not to bolt on barriers that punish the honest. It is to tighten the seams, count more of the votes people actually cast, and put the receipts on the table. Do that, and the people who doubt the system get something better than reassurance. They get proof.

Todd Welch is a Herald columnist covering local and state issues.