Exactly. It's desirable to validate signatures and stop at that prior to the Election. Saves a lot of time on election day, and doesn't risk spoiling the ballots accidentally. Just don't open the envelopes until the morning of election day. I understand a lot of states with the skeezy mail-in election schemes use the "envelope within the envelope" strategy.
@Cyber Liberty@mystery-ak@DB@catfish1957In Texas, we do that for security. The mailing envelope is opened and inside is the ballot inside a separate envelope, called the "ballot envelope". If the ballot is NOT in that ballot envelope, but loose in there, it is rejected. The ballot is in that ballot envelope so no one can see how the voter voted. Once the voter's materials are evaluated and are correct, the ballot envelope is stacked with the other ballot envelopes.
At some point when there is a stack of those envelopes, the envelopes are opened and the actual ballots are stacked up. No one knows how any voter voted since the ballot envelope was removed from the voter's mail envelope and all the ballot envelopes are stacked in a pile. (Also, if it takes days to evaluate mail ballots, at the end of each day, all that material is locked in metal boxes with two locks and kept in a locked room until the next day when the process starts again.)
Then, finally, on election day, the stacked actual ballots are taken to the counting station in that building.
Let's mention again, there is one Democrat and one Republican who work on a ballot's materials to verify the paperwork. There can be poll watchers in there if they have a poll watcher document. During the years I was that Judge, poll watchers did come but also left fairly soon as it was boring to sit there and watch ballot materials be evaluated.
People from the outside cannot look through windows to watch that process. Only legal poll watchers can be there. In that instance when film showed windows being covered up so outsiders could not see in, I would have covered those windows, too.
The worst election fraud happens in nursing homes. If the Judge of the board knew, read the election code how to evaluate ballots from nursing homes, millions of those votes would be thrown out. I did that in my county and the district attorney tried to get me removed as judge of that board - I won that case, he did not.