Legislative auditors: signature-verification process finds some errors tied to subjectivity; lawmakers and candidates press for more transparency and rule fixes

Auditors from the Office of the Legislative Auditor General told a Utah Legislature interim committee they tested signature verification on statewide nomination packets and found the verification process generally caught significant invalid signatures but produced measurable error rates driven largely by subjectivity in signature comparison.

Jesse Martinson, audit manager for the legislative auditors, told the committee the audit examined candidate nomination packets submitted for three statewide campaigns — including packets for then-Lieutenant Governor Spencer Cox, Senator John Curtis and Derek Brown — and tested a random sample of 1,000 signatures for each candidate. “It appears to us that the existing signature verification process is able, to reasonably identify significant instances of invalid signatures,” Martinson said, summarizing the office’s conclusions about the verification process while noting variability in error rates across the samples.

The audit’s sample found two types of errors: signatures that were validated but should have been rejected, and signatures that were invalidated but should have been accepted. For Governor Cox’s sample the auditors reported an incorrectly validated error rate of 2.4% and an incorrectly invalidated rate of 1.9%; when extrapolated to the full population of reviewed signatures those sample…