FBI Has Looked at Using AI to Review Signatures on Seized Mail-In Ballots — ProPublica

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The FBI has explored using artificial intelligence to assess the validity of signatures on tens of thousands of mail-in ballot envelopes seized from Fulton County, Georgia, the latest push in the Trump administration’s unprecedented reinvestigation of the 2020 vote.

The effort, according to internal communications reviewed by ProPublica and an agency tech specialist familiar with the work, focuses on comparing signatures on ballot envelopes with signatures on other election documents, such as registration forms. President Donald Trump has long claimed, without evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

In particular, he has repeatedly claimed that there was voter fraud in Georgia, where he lost to Joe Biden by just 11,779 votes. In January, the FBI raided Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold, collecting about 700 boxes of election materials, including about 150,000 mail-in ballots, of which roughly 116,000 went for Biden. Trump is set to deliver a speech Thursday about national election security and voting machine vulnerabilities, but it is unclear whether he will address the Fulton County investigation.

The signature-matching initiative was under discussion as recently as late June, but its current status is uncertain. A White House spokesperson declined to answer questions from ProPublica, referring them to the FBI. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.

The effort comes at the same time as the FBI has mandated that 260 analysts be redirected from field offices nationwide to focus on the Fulton County probe, according to an agency memo reviewed by ProPublica. The New York Times and MS Now previously reported the memo. MS Now has reported that some FBI analysts have been fired rather than work on the effort. Their work also includes comparing a spreadsheet of 175,000 voters with a commercial database to see, among other things, if they are still alive.

Whether done by people or technology, the accuracy of signature matching remains controversial.

Experts have raised serious concerns in legal cases and after analyzing recent election results about how accurately signature matching can identify voter fraud through practices like examining the size and slant of letters made in different circumstances.

The FBI technology specialist told ProPublica that the bureau has technology to compare images and that if it starts with a large enough dataset, then a signature-matching analysis could be “somewhat accurate.”

Ultimately, the tech specialist said, its results would turn on the threshold set for evidence of fraud: “It’s up to the builder of the system to define the guidelines.”

Some FBI staffers developing that strategy are trying to mitigate the political pressure to prove fraud in Fulton County by highlighting the limitations of broad signature analysis, arguing that though signature comparisons have been used in individual voter fraud investigations, they haven’t been done on this scale, according to the source. But agency leaders have continued to push forward.

There are grave concerns within the FBI that the results of the examination will reflect political influence, building on previous efforts by the administration to break longstanding guardrails meant to keep the federal government from interfering with elections. “Everyone is of the opinion that, whether they find anything or not, they are going to continue” to pursue proof of fraud, the source said.

Signature matching attracted controversy during and after the 2020 election and COVID-19 pandemic when more Democrats than Republicans used mail-in ballots. Trump promoted false claims that Georgia officials’ failure to match signatures on mail-in ballots had led to his loss by allowing fraud. “Must have signature check on envelopes now,” he wrote in late November 2020 on the social media platform Twitter, now X. “Far more votes than needed for flip” of the election to...