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They came from a back room somewhere. I think there were two of them. They directed me to a conference room.

“We have a signature problem,� one of them said.

It was the late 1980s. I was closing out an account that probably had less than a couple of hundred dollars in it as I moved out of town to my first newspaper job. I had opened the account in high school, back when the Christian Brothers still kept an eye on my penmanship.

A few years later, after an insurance job that included a lot of signing forms in triplicate, my signature was no longer what it used to be, apparently. The bankers offered me a sheet of paper, and I thought back to my high school days, and wrote out my full name — Anthony David Messenger — in the best cursive I could muster.

It matched. I left with a cashier’s check.

out of Texas sparked this memory the other day. There, a federal appeals court decided that Texas voters whose signatures perhaps have changed over time can get their mail-in ballots tossed without being offered an opportunity to prove that their signature is really theirs. A lower court judge had issued an injunction against the rule, suggesting that people’s right to vote would be better protected if they had to be notified before their ballot was tossed, and had a chance to “cure� the signature, much like I did at the bank so many years ago.

U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia had ruled that the state’s system for matching signatures “plainly violates certain voters’ constitutional rights.� The panel of appeals court judges — two of the three appointed by President Donald Trump — said that the more important priority was protecting against potential voter fraud.

This is the landscape upon which part of the 2020 election is being waged in courtrooms across America, including Missouri, where the lines are clear: Democrats want more people to vote. Republicans want fewer.

So it was in Pennsylvania. On the same day as the Texas ruling, a 4-4 tie in the U.S. Supreme Court a state supreme court ruling that allowed Pennsylvania election officials to count some mailed ballots up to three days after Election Day. In its ruling, the Pennsylvania high court noted that state’s strong constitutional protections for the right to vote.

“Most states have very strong protections around voting,� notes Jefferson City lawyer Chuck Hatfield, of the Stinson law firm. “For example, the Missouri Supreme Court has twice ruled against voter ID-type requirements.�

There have been multiple lawsuits this year in ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ over the Legislature’s failure to make it easier — and clearer — for Missourians to use the mail to vote amid the coronavirus pandemic. Hatfield has been involved in some of those cases. On Thursday, a federal appeals court ruled that Missourians who request a mail-in ballot must mail it in. Those who vote absentee might be able to drop the ballot off in person. Some of those voters will require a notary.

In each legal battle, the lines are drawn as they are around the nation: Democrats want to protect or expand the constitutional right to vote; Republicans want to diminish it, claiming that almost nonexistent voter fraud somehow puts the credibility of the election at stake.

The good news for Americans is that state constitutions are winning the battle. There are no fewer than 25 states with active voting cases regarding the 2020 election, and according , a Democratic election attorney involved in many of them, the right-to-vote is winning out in court battles over voter suppression. Early voting numbers in many states are breaking records.

That’s good news for democracy. But just in case: Be careful with that signature on your mail-in or absentee ballot.

Make every vote count.