My daughter got a jury summons at my address. She’s lived in Oregon since 2014. I called to tell them, and they said her voter registration here was still active and had last been used in November. She hasn’t voted in this state in eleven years. Somebody had been voting under her name in her hometown, and the signature on file wasn’t hers. I didn’t tell her right away because I wanted one honest hour to think about who in this town would still have her old information.
Then the clerk offered to let me see the signature card in person. When she slid it across the counter, I recognized the handwriting immediately. It was my wife’s. My wife had died seven years ago, and she had never mentioned anything about my daughter’s voter registration. I asked the clerk if the signature had been updated recently, and she said no, it had been on file since my daughter first registered. Then she quietly added that someone had requested a replacement ballot using the same information two months earlier.
I went home and searched through an old box of family paperwork. At the bottom, I found my daughter’s original voter registration form from when she was eighteen. The signature on it was clearly hers, and it looked nothing like the one the clerk had shown me. I called my daughter and asked whether her mother had ever helped her register, and she said she remembered filling everything out herself. Then she asked why I was asking. I told her about the summons, and there was a long silence before she said, “Dad, Mom used to tell me never to let anyone in this town see my signature.”
That was the first time I had ever heard her say that. I asked why, but she said she thought it was just one of the strange things her mother used to say. I went back to the clerk the next morning and asked whether there were any other records connected to the signature. She checked the system and found three jury summonses, two ballot requests, and one address change, all connected to my daughter’s name. The address change had been filed six months after my wife died. And the new address wasn’t in Oregon or anywhere else my daughter had ever lived—it was the house we sold in 2016, with my wife’s name still listed as the person receiving mail.:::
