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hi hi everyone and welcome to part two of our intro to voter signature authentication training i'm emily levy the founder and director of scrutineers and i want to reintroduce to you our amazing trainer and expert in the field sheila sheila it's all yours take it away okay thank you thanks everyone for being here today good morning everyone yes and i'll echo that thanks for being here i didn't get any emails from you so i don't know are there any burning questions that we need to discuss before we go on to part two which is mainly a review and a little more depth on on a couple of things so so you can type questions into the chat or i believe you can also raise your hand if you go to participants and then look at the options next to your name okay and emily will be monitoring that right yes i will and um we we have we posted in the circle that we created in scrutineers um an article that um let's see who was it that sent it to me it was oh we're gonna talk about that oh we are okay great okay a little bit okay okay all right so i'm gonna share screen it was mark shipley that's who sent it okay so uh you should just be seeing one big purple screen now is that right yes okay part two introduction yes okay because you know as i said i have three screens and so i just want to make sure you're on the right one okay and uh you know who i am sheila lowe and how to reach me sheila at sheilalow.com and i thought we'd start with a little humor because in every lecture i give people one of this doctors handwritings so i like this cartoon so what uh actually we're talking about if there are no questions from last week is the main thing is consistency and for two signatures to match we have to say that overall they're consistent they don't need to be perfect in fact as we've discussed they should not be perfect because if they were perfect if they were a perfect match that means that one of them is a fake now that's not going to happen in your case but um the point is that that they don't need to be perfect because everybody has their personal range of variation so it's not going to look the same way every time some people will be very consistent and others will have a wider range so that's the key now here's the this is from the article that emily was just about to mention you may have seen a couple of days ago i think it was on wednesday in the new york times they had a big article about signature authentication on the ballot so you can go back and and look in the new york times if you want to read the whole article but i thought this is it's linked to in our voter signature authentication circle so and this this even if you can't get to the new york times this image appears in the preview of the article so right and when i first saw this you know it's a little test and i didn't read it properly and i started getting frustrating frustrated but then i saw what they're asking is simply that you matched two signatures out of all these eleven so take a minute here and see how well you do just find two signatures that match or consistent with each other is the way we put it is what frustrated you that you thought you thought they were asking telling you one correct one and asking you which one matched that one no i just i didn't because i didn't read the headline properly i thought they were asking you know like like sometimes you'll have a whole bunch of them they'll say okay you know just match the pairs so i was looking for more than one pair and of course i wasn't finding them so all we're looking for is a pair just give you a few seconds okay and you might want to put your choices in the chat if you like so i know that wasn't really much time but if you picked number nine down here and number three you got it right and actually this is this is kind of a tricky one because when you have such an indistinct signature uh it's much harder to identify but number three and number nine were the ones how did you do put your hands one person said three and nine but i don't know if she said it before or no a couple people said three and nine sarah and laura and i also got it right when i did it and then i realized that it's actually this seems a lot harder than what we would be being asked to do at elections offices because if they had told us one that was right and then said which of them matched it that would be that would have been a lot easier right yeah that makes sense dana thought three and nine and then changed to a different answer ah okay well three and nine that has got it so i just wondered if people would raise their actual hand if they got it if they want to oh maybe they don't want to all right we'll we'll go on regarding authenticity first of all just you be looking at the big picture if overall big picture characteristics are consistent with the known signatures it's probably genuine and in your cases most of the time it's going to be genuine but let's look a little closer about authenticity the big picture okay first thing to look at and we're really going to be repeating some of this stuff are the signatures consistent with you know the one on the ballot and the and the reference sample or the exemplar we call it you can give it any different name the known signatures look at the spelling whether or not it has a middle initial look at the size of the capital letters and the style of the capital letters are they tall much taller than the rest of the writing are they small are they medium those things tend to be pretty consistent over time if you see any differences major differences are they explainable so like did the person have is their reference signature 20 years old and they never changed it that would be a difference that could be explainable because over time their signature may have changed with age or illness or whatever and when i got a divorce the first time i completely changed my signature so if i hadn't changed that with the voter registrar i might have been in trouble are the letter designs consistent and if you recall the letter designs have to do with their shape and that would be are they rounded are they angular or are they thready and i know that um not everybody was clear on what thread is we're going to be looking at a bunch in a minute but basically it's the letters are not clearly defined and they they flatten out so they're indistinct one way to determine thread in handwriting is if you took that word out of context would you be able to read it so if the letters break down so that they're illegible they're probably thready we look at the movement which has to do with the speed we're going to look at speed today and the direction is it going to the right or is it going to the left or is it going back and forth the connections that um has to do with again whether it's rounded or angular or thready but it's also the degree of connectedness do all the letters connect do they connect to the capital are they separate are they printed do are there breaks because if a person's signing their name and they break they're usually going to break in the same place every time maybe not always but most of the time we look at proportions and the proportions are taking the middle zone letters and you remember those are the vowel letters or s m n the letters that don't rise up or fall down below the baseline so the middle zone is is the measure that we go by the height of the middle zone you can actually measure how high average is three millimeters and the upper zone you know we'll see what the proportion is it might be like one and a half times as tall as the middle zone and you do the same with the lower zone just it doesn't matter what the proportions are it's just that that that they stay similar because that's that's something unconscious that we don't have to think about when we when we write and we look at the rhythm and um just to take a second about what rhythm is and i think maybe i covered this last time but rhythm is contraction and release in handwriting when you write the muscles in your hand contract and release and when they release they're going away from the body in an upstroke and when they're contracting they're coming back down towards the body in the downstroke excuse me i forgot to bring some water um so do you want to pause for a moment and get some i will thank you i'll just be a second totally fine so in case anyone can't see this in the chat while sheila's gone i'll say that that new york times article which is again posted in the voter signature authentication circle in scrutineers explains helps you see what's different in the signatures that aren't the ones that match so it goes through in detail the kinds of things that we were talking about last week that you can notice when signatures are not written by the same person excellent okay um the last thing that i'll say about rhythm maybe what i really need is my losses um a rhythm you could think of it as being straight strokes and all squeezed together on one end of the spectrum or big and loopy on the other end oh dear excuse me okay and um finally in that area we're looking at line quality which is the actual ink line it might have blobs on it or it might look a little ragged or it will be smooth so that's what we're looking for the finer points of authenticity include the space the space between the letters the words you won't have lines the size and proportions of the letters which i just covered letter combinations um th for example usually the way people make a th is is um whether it's at the beginning of the word or like if it was teresa for instance with a th is usually pretty consistent when it's in their name or at the th in the middle of the word or whatever combination of letters that you can see um look for consistency connections talked about that pen lifts which just means that there's um breaks in the line and some of those new york times signatures they showed in the in the um lower part of the article that emily was talking about where they show you what to look for there were pen lifts in places where they shouldn't have been but they were consistent um the beginning and ending strokes the the width the um the length and the shape of them so we'll look at those now if it's not authentic what do you look for unexplained differences so again the the time length between the signatures could be an explained difference but if there's unexplained differences which could include structural differences the way the writing actually looks the proportions are different the rhythm is different these are so these are the opposite to what we just looked at the line quality resting dots are where if somebody is trying to simulate a name it's like it's kind of like painting by numbers you know you got to look at a little piece at a time and you're trying to make it look like it so there's a lot of stopping and starting and that can result in what we call resting dots little dots of ink on the on the line and then of course also if there's a large rubber stamp of the word counterfeit on it that would be a dead giveaway yeah that that uh watch for that okay so um remember it shouldn't be perfect to be genuine and there could be some defects in a genuine signature it's the thing about the rhythm and the resting dots see the thing about resting dots is it can be a sign of forgery but it can also just be a defect in the pen like on the tip little bits of lint to collect in there that you don't see and it can happen in illness too so you're not going to look at just one of these things it's like the preponderance of evidence let's talk about oh the other the other thing is the speed if somebody's uh forging counterfeiting a uh or simulating is the word i want to use somebody's simulating a name that's not theirs the speed is going to be slower so let's talk about speed oh fast writing came up first fast writing is natural it's spontaneous it has less detail than slower writing the faster the writing the less detail there will be the line tends to be smooth because you're moving so fast and the beginning and ending strokes are often tapered in other words they're thinner at the end because as the pen hits the paper it's already moving and so it has a it has a tapered thinner beginning and ending and when it leaves the paper in a fast writing it goes up quickly and it tapers off in a slow writing you have more blunt beginnings and endings the t-bars may be longer and they will also be tapered um the eye dots will not be small and round and neat they'll they look like a dash sometimes i just analyzed a handwriting last night where the eye dots were connected to the next letter which is very fast slow writing on the other hand it tends to be more hesitant it may be shaky the details are going to be very clear each letter can be seen clearly it may not have as good rhythm i've mentioned the blood beginning and endings and the heavy or round eye dots so let's look at some examples here are some and let me just say that everything in handwriting is seen on a continuum so we go from very slow to very fast it's going to be somewhere on the continuum and it doesn't matter exactly how slow or fast it is just generally is it fast writing is it slow writing or is it medium so here um on over here we have steve bannon's very fast lack of detailed writing and you see where i have the arrow i don't know if you can see there's a little thinned out part here where he started fast and you can see it better on the ending stroke where it fades away it's tapered here let's see oh that's steve mnuchin and he has a very this kind of signature is really easy to forge he should change that he should think about changing it but um it's smooth it's less tapered but it is it has a little tapering but he hasn't he's using a thicker pin so it's harder to see the taper but here you can see a tapered stroke at the end of that stroke dianne feinstein's is a little more uh defined see it's fast this is kind of thready and this is thready here because it's less defined and amy klobuchar same she thins out threads her um m and into the y so and this is eric holder at the bottom they're all pretty fast or very fast writing now if you slow it down we have um medium speed here look at frederick douglass's beautiful writing you see every letter there's no question about who wrote this and um all of these are quite clear even though like al franken he thins out at the end but it's fast but you can see all the letters so it's not super fast like the others we looked at and down here in the bottom i sometimes it's hard to decide where to what category to put them in but um all you're looking for is consistency with the the other uh the reference samples uh as justin trudeau who is is moderately fast but you can't tell what his name is slower speed uh here with the late herman cain you see a lot of angles and angles slow down the writing so that's a slower speed writing some of these like paula deen is is slower because it's well defined with meghan markle she adds embellishments and sometimes you'll see that but of course she was a calligrapher and that's where those embellishments come from these guys are slower because they have poor rhythm in their writing uh john mccain down here in the bottom left was hard to hard to categorize but look at the top right is poppy montgomery she prints her her signature and each letter is very clear and open and same with ein rand who has some angles in there so again looking for consistency oh and let's take a moment for a little humor again we talked about john hancock last week with his signature that looks like this but one does wonder what it looked like before he came to that with the big paraph underneath and some people will add ornamentation to their writing so that's something to look forward to now i watched my son one of my sons sign his ballot envelope yesterday and he just kind of like scribbled it out and i said that's your signature are you sure that's what's on your registration and he goes yeah you know yes it'll look the same so for apropos of nothing i guess let's look at pressure which includes the width of the stroke now if you're looking at like you are here handwriting on a screen you cannot tell the absolute pressure because in the case of both presidents roosevelt and hermann goring down here it looks like they might have a heavy pressure but prob it's not it's because the thickness of the stroke is determined by the pen that they use which would have been at their time a fountain pen the ones on the left look much lighter and again they're using a different pen the difference is if somebody writes with a fine tip pin and has a light line like like the ones on the left they're usually having let me i'm sorry that's just going to ring for a moment um they'll be holding the pen up at the tip and with a with a taller hold on the pen in other words the pin will be more upright the the ones on the right don't know how to turn that off um the ones on the right have a longer hold that type of a pen or a felt pin the person holds it on the back the person will be holding the pen more flat and further back on the barrel and i'm sorry about the phone and i hope that didn't interfere too much with you say it again i i was distracted by the phone right you just kind of back up a couple sentences and say your point of view you're talking about okay the pin the pressure hold and that phone never rings which is why i don't know how to turn it off okay so the the pen with the fine point somebody who uses a fine tip pen usually is holding it close to the tip and more upright and that produces that light line on the right on the other hand they're using a fountain pen or a thick tip pin maybe a felt tip pen they hold it because they like the look and they hold it further back on the barrel and it has a a greater angle and that's what produces that kind of a look so it may not be heavy pressure the only way to tell the pressure is to turn the paper over and feel it and if you can feel the writing on the back of the paper then it means it's heavy pressure some people write so heavy it's almost like braille and others write very light so um you won't be able to tell if you're looking on screen what what the pressure is like but you can look at the appearance and see whether it appears to be thinner or thicker and i hope that makes sense let's see about poor line quality poor line quality can be for any of these reasons it can be a lack of education somebody who hasn't learned to write properly it can come from illness or being tired from lack of muscle control which is has to do with illness or could be drugs and alcohol have an effect on muscle control and it can be from forgery or disguise but i'm sorry i could not find a good sample that would make sense for poor line quality but is there anything in that new york times image that that represents poor line quality not that i recall okay but you'll know it if you see it you know it's that kind of thing you know if you see it it just looks kind of jagged um might have resting dots and it just well the let me go back to this one this now the one down here on the bottom it's jagged because it was it was a poor effects but this is the kind of thing that i'm talking about or this one up here it just it looks kind of saggy and let's pretend that this i don't know if that name is charles we'll just pretend it's the lime quality but you can see there's something about it that you just see something is it's it's not smooth like these others okay now we'll look at some connecting strokes which is a review oh here's beyonce we're talking first about garlands which are cup-like strokes and um i want to get this other one up nelson mandela is a good example of cup strokes you see how they're they're rounded on the bottom and they're open on the top so it's like an open cup and uh beyonce does the same thing but hers is much more squeezed together but you can see not only the letters are cup shaped but the connections between them and that's something that's very um idiosyncratic it's it's uh the person's gonna do it every time on the other hand we have the cup turned upside down which is called an arcade or an arch and as you see here in putin he's got the rounded parts on the top it kind of looks like razor wire it does it does and of course graphologically it tells about his personality but we're not here to talk about that jk rowling has a a combination of thready and arcade writing she's got these beautiful big arcades big arches but this part of the writing threads out so you can't see it so you have combinations so those are rounded rounded on the top are rounded on the bottom angles you can see nothing but angles here in donald trump's signature and also in heinrich himmler's signature is very angular we have some angles in jackson pollock and stan lee so see the angles there so those things roundedness or angles or thread which we'll look at next are going to be consistent all of these are very thready writings where you just you can't tell what the name is unless you know what it is does anybody have any question about anything so far i will watch the chat for a moment and see if any questions come up because we're going to go into some practice great okay so i i have a question actually waiting to see if other people ask questions which is i'm not sure if when we're if if we're working in an elections office if we will always be comparing two signatures are that are on the screen or if we might actually be comparing one that's on the screen and one that's on paper and if if that is the situation where we're comparing one that's on the screen and one that's on paper does anything need to be different about how we look at it um no it's just and that's actually what i was assuming you would be doing but um it works either way um just you know if you're looking for the consistency the only thing that's going to make a difference is the pressure and you just simply will have to leave that out but just go for the look of it well depending on also kind of what the physical setup is we might not be able to see both signatures at the same time like i could imagine if one is flat on the desk and one is upright on a screen that seems like it would be a lot harder to compare them um well you can pick up the one on the desk and hold it next to the screen if if you're an observer you may not be able to do that you'll have to deal with the way the people but but i suppose we could ask can you please hold it so that everybody can see both signatures at the same time yeah that's um yeah you know there's those difficulties that um we can't necessarily handle uh yeah you have to do the best you can yeah okay jan bandur has a question what about the overall size of a signature my architect friend always had a neat small signature after his stroke his signature became four times as large yes well that's one of those explainable differences and if you didn't know that which of course you're not going to have that information you might need to set it aside for further investigation because physiological conditions have a big effect on handwriting that's one of them um i think i mentioned before in parkinson's that you have micrographia where the handwriting gets very small or in a blind person the handwriting is largely likely to be larger so those are things you know if you if you're comparing a signature that's gotten very big after it was very small well that's that's a clue probably you know somebody if you if you have somebody who's trying to forge or simulate somebody else's writing they're going to try and make it as much i like it as possible in most cases so if you get one that's very different but has underlying characteristics that are similar then it's probably going to be authentic that's such an important point will you say that again i want to make sure people catch that because i think it's extremely important for our application um which part um that if some that if there's something that's significantly different like the size it's and the characteristics are similar it's likely to be not to be a forgery because something like size would be an easy thing for somebody to imitate if they were forging yeah somebody who's trying to disguise their own handwriting will try to change pictorial things like for instance the capital letters but but somebody who is trying to simulate somebody else's writing will try to make it look as much as like a like as possible makes sense they want it to look like it so if it's just the size but the but the main characteristics are similar the shape even you know somebody even who who's had um some physiological problem will still try to maintain the shape unless they've had severe brain damage and simply in that area of the brain and simply don't remember how they signed before then it's going to look really different two of our of our members who were part of the observing team in chicago on thursday chimed in here saying that the large video screen had two copies of the envelope signature and a copy of the voter registration signature easy to see from ten feet away oh okay well that's good and of course the more you can get the better i read in something that i was you know some article i was reading about this that you could possibly get signatures through the years in some places so at least the least you can do is ask whether there are more signatures available if you have a question okay so let's pick on doctors again and because people always ask me about doctor's handwriting basically oh this is um i wanted to mention about digitally captured electronic signatures like if if you're using something that was from the dmv where they had to sign on on a digital pad again it's the overall picture the general shape and form and rhythm and all of that and if you aren't sure ask for more all right now we're going to do a few exercises real life exercises here are four signatures donald hadley one of them is not genuine and this is an actual case that went to court so um maybe you could put in the chat which one you think is not genuine one two three or four and kind of see if you can get a gut reaction so far everyone agrees is typed into the chat and what number are they saying three five excellent you're all good document examiners because that's the one that um the other party in a in a lawsuit was claiming that was genuine and of course it was not now the interesting thing is that the the guy mr hadley had had brain surgery but his handwriting remained consistent afterwards so good for you okay here's another one actual case one two three or four so we're getting mostly threes again oh now i can't tell where we started out the last answer in this answer someone says different break patterns okay yes yeah number three is correct and um yeah the the rhythm is really quite different there's also notice here he usually makes a t i mean a period after his t and in here we they've left out the t and just the overall rhythm the the alignment on the baseline kind of well this one goes up a little but the indefinite threadiness here he tried to um make it you know without he tried to get through the name without having to put in all of the letters but you see like the the r and the a the n are all easily seen in these known examples is it interesting there's some breaks in the signature in both two and four that aren't there in the in the other ones between the n and the k and frank and number two and between the yeah c and the h or the whatever that is in them uh frank in the bottom one and number four there's a break between halfway between the last name yeah it well it appears to be a break um it might be just a what we call an air stroke where the pin starts to lift because it gets light here too but um yes it looks like a break and so that's part of his range of variation because when you look at the rest of the signature just overall it has a consistent appearance but that's apparently part of this variation but the important thing look at the space between you see how the t always touches or goes beyond that's one idiosyncrasy um he's doesn't i see his the k reaches closer here but over here it doesn't so that's just his natural variation and here the f doesn't go below the line where here and here it does but it's still the same shape the movement is the same does that make sense the third one seems darker as well mark is saying ah yeah because you know if you use heavy pressure i mean um if you if you're simulating the writing and you're going slower to try to make it look the same the pressure is going to be heavier too so that would make sense okay here's this is kind of a trick one the okay i won't say anything so are we looking what are we looking for we're looking for it looks like there's two pairs here is there is one are they the same writer all four of them all four of them i'll just because this is kind of a trick so i'll tell you something the two on the top are identical so this this came to me actually there were three signatures in this case that were identical 100 and when i lay them on top of each other you could see that they were absolutely identical so remember what does that mean it means that something is a fake and the number three and four are her known signatures so if you look the the b i mean the b especially is very similar but it's kind of shaky now there's poor line quality although it was it was faxed i think i was wondering if it could be on a rough surface that's possible too but it was probably traced rather than just simulated and sometimes that's that's a way of forging is tracing laying a genuine signature on top and then or on the bottom and putting a blank piece of paper on top and tracing it so the it when you look at the three and four you see that the signature is very smooth and quickly done but the ones on the top look slow they don't have good rhythm they they just they don't have the same kind of speed you know what makes me think that they might be a tracing is if you look in the top two the tail after the a at the end of brenda is actually not identical in the two hmm yeah and so for trade for tracing that that could happen whereas yes yes because the person who's tracing may actually move the paper so the spacing may be a little different they make some things a little different but these two one and two are identical i don't know if she's she's saying that l's are more distinct than three and four or the or the eyes i can't tell because of the font that's being used whether it's a lowercase l or a capital i that she's saying um i think that it's a this is an i willing willing him l she's saying l okay yeah the two elves yeah so just as an example now here's a difficult one one of these is not authentic in most classes this one get people get wrong but hopefully everyone here will get it right looks like one and four are the two the two that are getting the most votes okay number one number one yes and that was worth 12 million dollars so and where do we cash that check yeah well the person who cashed it ended up in federal prison i believe so um yeah you could see there are many differences and i'll just tell you a funny what i thought was funny about this i was in deposition with the opposing attorney and i one of the characteristics that i had mentioned as being inconsistent was this um ending stroke and it goes up and in a curve and uh so i said that was one of the unexplainable differences and the attorney said well what if what if he was leaning on the back of a car to sign and a strong wind came and blew his arm into his arm yeah and also no middle initial sarah is saying yes that is correct so and and it's very it's it's more defined in the the o in particular but it's not the rhythm is different it's not the same like um part of his range of variation but there's been an attempt to simulate okay one more i think i think this is the last oh no there's two more okay um here we have one that does not belong like on sesame street one of these things is not like the other which one is it looks like we have mostly a consensus that it's number two that is correct not just because it's darker um yeah this was uh a case of of a second family producing a different will so um yeah you see this is this well again we've got poor line quality but you can't really tell notice this break here it's not smooth she came down here and stopped and started again here so that's quite different because he always had a smooth whoops smooth line go back yet extremely tall upper loops which would be something a feature that would be important for the for the comparison but but the writing overall is smooth and then of course they've got this long stroke going back to cross the t and coming forward again but it just it doesn't it he always brings it and and i have many many samples he always brings it way forward so those are the kinds of things that you might find his a's i mean them o's that's that looks like an a but it's an o the o's appear open or at least it may not be an o but the form of this um part of the writing looks like an oh looks like a u here it's open at the top but that's an o okay and it looks like there was a stop here and a start again and here you've got a blob of ink that doesn't belong because it's a resting dot okay are we all clear on that one you did well and then the last one you did see one of these last week again one of them is a forgery which one okay we have much less agreement on this one oh okay so well maybe i'm looking at some of the answers it looks like we have four and one for the most part that people are seeing okay well it is number four and look look why look how jagged and this is very poor line quality and you can see in the in the o here that's an o resting dot it's it's crooked it's angular there's a resting dot over here it's jagged because it's written so slowly resting dot here this one is is not exactly the same as the others but it's smooth and it's written quickly so i can see why you might suspect this one and if you have one like that that you suspect you could set it aside and ask if there are other exemplars or ask that it be verified by the voter so some people are saying two also for this one oh nope it's four so one seems to be missing letters four seems to include more characters in the first name the problem the main problem with four is the line quality it's got tremor it's jagged that's the things to you know a big thing to look for so the people who said two do you want to say why you thought to look how smooth all three of those are of course you know you're looking at it as from a novice point of view i assume so um you know it's okay but really in this group look at how jagged and and there's tremor it's shaky shaky here and we don't know of any reason why there would this was a criminal case and she didn't do it okay so one of the people who thought too was additional letters and the angle of the letters oh okay angle is is something that changes a lot and it changes with mood so you have to be careful don't pick out one characteristic just make sure you're looking at the whole picture because some things may change temporarily but look at look for the smoothness first thing look and see if there's any tremor jagged strokes shaky strokes ink dots resting dots look for those things does that make sense yeah i think it does well then um ending with a call to action and remember if you have changed your name if you got married got divorced or for whatever reason changed your name if you have changed your signature for any reason remember to update it with the voter registrar because you want your you want your vote to count so let's just do a quick checklist spelling is it cursive or printing what's the alignment on the signature line what's the slant how the capital letters look size and embellishment the size and proportion overall the speed the connections and you could make yourself a little worksheet yeah i'm actually thinking it might be really useful to have something that's like that people could use as a lock screen on their phone if they're going to be going to a to an elections office to observe so they could quickly check in with with a list if they needed to i wonder if anybody here would be interested in taking the information from the slides and creating a lock screen we could we could put on our phones what a good idea i never think of that because my sarah says she can do that great wonderful so we'll post the slides with the recording cool my my phone has a small screen so it wouldn't work but if you have a big enough screen that would be great so um coming to the end and i know emily has something to say yeah a little bit so thank you so much sheila this has been absolutely eye-opening and fabulous can we give her some thumbs up if you've if you've appreciated this and found it useful and i wanted to give an opportunity to the folks who were um who who did some observing in chicago this week to talk about it if you would like to so let's see i'm trying to remember who it was it was patricia and claire would you would you like let me let me request to unmute if you'd like to unmute and and um tell us a little bit about what that was like i think that would be great so claire you're unmuted and or i've asked to you given you permission to unmute and patricia too would either of you like to share about your experience yes we were very impressed first of all we went in and armed with binoculars thinking that we would be a long distance away and we would be looking at small computers or whatever but they had huge computers and they had four in a fairly large room and then they had they were um had the uh picture from the um mail-in ballot and the voter the signature of record um on the same and also enlarged as well so they had two from the ballot one enlarged and the other one um from the record and um and then they had another um you know to accept the signatory or to reject it or if the voter assisted those were the only kind of options and then they had the three panel of judges and according to illinois law the decisions to accept or reject a signature have to be unanimous if there's only two to one or whatever uh it doesn't hold so wait so to reject it has to be not unanimous or to accept it has to be unanimous both okay yeah um and they were really going through it pretty quickly and people were saying okay and whatever and then occasionally they would stop it and they would either buy it and there would be a little bit of you know discussion or whatever and then if they uh all agreed then um they would make a note on a on a sheet to contact the voter um so the only thing that that we observed that we thought would be nicer is if they had another signature to compare us with but they didn't because they have more than one signature on file um so that was the only thing and they were able to when we were concerned about how they were going to be able to process them in a timely manner and it seemed as though it was working quite smoothly and quite quickly we estimated that they were one um one station was able to do about maybe 20 to 25 a minute and then yeah so and chicago already has um i think they have 450 000 uh returned no no 450 000 requested um ballots and then they have returned already as of um thursday 80 000. and so but thursday was the first day that they were actually processing them and so we estimated that in one full day with five stations uh for six hours although they were doing eight hours that they could do about thirty thousand a day so that was encouraging and they were considering that they might offer another shift if they needed to you know speed up the process and do you know if they hired temporary workers to do it uh i think the pa yeah yeah they always do hire temporary workers yeah okay judges all have to be uh assigned from the democratic and republican parties okay thank you so much patricia do you have anything you want to add yeah can you hear me yes okay yeah well claire covered you know most of the important things that i was going to say but one thing that impressed me was that the judges seemed very serious about what they were doing and also the things they identified and signatures reflected some training in signature analysis by the way they looked at the capital letters and so forth and um and they were very careful about they only rejected three when i was there for about 45 minutes at once at one point they only rejected three and all those voters were going to be notified to uh be able to correct that either by an email uh confirming that they did send it in that that was their vote or to send in a written note with a signature you know so that that could all be reconciled before election day which was very good yeah fantastic thank you so much jan has a question for you sheila which is during she says during my 18 years as an election administrator i saw a lot of similarity between members of households my staff were able finally to distinguish between a father and son say it with the same names same address but it took some study what can you say about family signature similarities yeah there's been studies done at dr edward people's at the university of colorado years ago in the 80s did a study on family similarities and he found that there was significantly higher agreement between family members than people in the general public so that's i showed a sample last week of uh of one of the george bush's signatures both of their signatures are very very similar so that yeah that could be challenging and i don't know how you would get around that unless you unless you can verify it okay thank you any other questions for sheila or for me or for the folks who observed in chicago let's see if we don't have any raised hands so so i want to really encourage you all now that you've learned this to explore whether you can put it to use so to look at whether there is hiring for temporary positions if you have enough availability to perhaps get one of those in in your jurisdiction or to to call the elections office and find out what you need in order to be able to observe and if they say that you need um that you need to be connected with a political party you could consider calling up your local office of whatever political party you're a member of and say that you have training in this and that you'd like to volunteer um and if they say that you need to that you could have be credentialed by an organization see what you can find out about that if if scrutineers qualifies to be able to credential you i'm happy to do that to give you permission to to observe on behalf of scrutineers so so you could send me a private message or an email i'll put my email address into the chat and let me know if you need to do that the possible complication there is that we don't have non-profit status we do have legal status but we don't have non-profit status we are fiscally sponsored by another group so it might need to be our fiscal sponsor and they and i could ask them if necessary so if you do need need that organizational permission or cert or credentialing we'll be able to find it for you some of our member organizations are non-profits and what someone will be able to to give you a letter like that and so feel free to use the circle that we've created for voter signature authentication to share your experiences your questions if you come up with good practice samples share them with other people and also sarah is going to create a lock screen with kind of the things to remember to look for that you can put onto your phone if you would like to and we'll share that in the circle as well so if you haven't joined that circle the way you do that is go to circles from the home page of the scrutineers website and then it's one of the top ones on the list i think it's the third one on the list right now is voter signature authentication you can just join it and then you're in nina's asking any idea how to become an electoral observer in san francisco um so i actually do live in san francisco and haven't done this here but i think my advice would be the same for any place which is first look at the website so that you don't have to disturb the workers if they've already made this information available and then if you can't find the information there call the office and ask if you have trouble getting through you might also call one of the political parties and ask them or a candidate that you're supporting and ask them observers are called different things in different places so if you have trouble finding it on the website that might be why um so you could also look up monitors i think that's another thing it would be called in some places and other places may use other words as well i'm not sure um so let's see i'm being asked privately if there's any update on the sise campaign and um we say 2020 as you may have heard is a new tool that we have at our disposal for election protection this year they did a trial of it in 2018 they're rolling it out for real you know in a in a larger scale on 20 in 2020 and it's a place where people can report problems they have voting and they will be um vetted a little bit by volunteers working with sise and then actually mapped on a gis map that people can see from the website so if you go to um csa2020.com [Music] s-e-e-s-a-y-2020.com you can you can actually see the map and see what com what complaints people are having where about voting we're also going to be able to upload photographs of poll tapes to that site and it so it'll be mapped where they've already been collected and they've got some other tools that excuse me going to be using for that they just became a member organization of scrutineers so and i also our podcast episode that comes out on monday is an interview with the person who created sise 2020 deepak puri so check that out um so one thing i want to make sure that you are aware of with this map is that they're going to be scraping social media for complaints and mapping complaints that people haven't reported directly to them but that have they've reported to social media and they're they're using a social media listening tool to do that it doesn't really matter if you know what that means the important thing is they're only listening in certain places where they anticipate problems and that's going to mean that what's on the map is not necessarily representative of what's happening because it's there are going to be places where people haven't heard of the tool so they're not reporting problems or where they're not scraping social media for the problem so while the problems that are reported should be real we believe will be real absence of reports from some place doesn't mean that things are okay i hope that made sense and hope that answered your question uh jan so you're saying that observers are called challengers in michigan and that's true not at the polling place not just at the polling place but also when people are observing in election offices they're called challengers can you can can you clarify that in the chat maybe you already have it takes a moment to come through yes otherwise you get stuck in a corner and you cannot see anything they're called pole watchers in illinois okay so there's some different things that that that might be called i i thought both those terms challengers and poll watchers were about polling places but it's hard to keep track of what's happening everywhere so i want to thank all of you for your commitment to this work for participating in these two trainings the recording of this one will be posted later today and thank you so much sheila for sharing your expertise with us and teaching us in such a thorough and also fun way thank you i'm happy to have done it oh by the way if anybody is interested in learning more excuse me oh sorry i would recommend my colleague reed hayes and i meant to put up on the slide but um he's you can find him if you google him and he's an excellent teacher if you want h-a-y-e-s yes he's in hawaii okay and i and i just um asked gave everybody permission to unmute so that if you want to say thank you or bye or any final words you can do that before signing off and thank you this is great thank you thank you very much lovely thank you thanks everyone have a great rest of your weekend thank you save the chat thank you for that reminder