Recording intent, not proving cryptographic origin
An electronic signature records a specific person's intent to sign a document, captured through whatever means the signing platform uses — a typed name, a drawn signature, a click confirming agreement — tied to enough surrounding evidence to establish who signed what, and when. This is a genuinely different mechanism from code signing, which cryptographically proves a software artifact's origin and integrity; an electronic signature is about a person's recorded intent to agree, not a mathematical proof over a file's bytes.
This distinction matters because the two are easy to conflate: both produce something called a 'signature,' and both are meant to establish trust in something. But they answer entirely different questions — code signing proves what a file is and where it came from; an electronic signature records that a specific person meant to agree to a specific document.
The evidentiary strength is invisible in the rendered result
The strength of an electronic signature's evidentiary value depends entirely on how rigorously the platform verified the signer's identity and how tamper-evident the resulting record actually is — a signature captured with weak identity verification and a record that could plausibly be altered afterward provides considerably less assurance than one built on stronger verification and a genuinely tamper-evident record, even though both might render as an identical-looking signature on the final page. Evaluating a signing platform means looking underneath the visible signature at exactly this: what verification actually happened, and how tamper-resistant the resulting record genuinely is.