Benton County Election Commissioners (from left) Greg Day, Melanie Hoskins and Russell Anzalone listen to Benton County Clerk Betsy Harrell during a commission meeting on Nov. 12, 2024 in Rogers. (Antoinette Grajeda/Arkansas Advocate)
Arkansas election officials are still processing ballots ahead of Friday’s deadline to certify the 2024 election.
Some voters had to file provisional ballots last week because of a problem involving registrations completed at state driver’s license offices, but it wasn’t a widespread problem, at least one county official said this week.
When there’s a question about a voter’s eligibility, a provisional ballot allows them the opportunity to vote, and the ballot is then set aside so officials can investigate the issue and resolve it later, Benton County Clerk Betsy Harrell said Tuesday.
Voters who cast a provisional ballot without an ID had until noon Monday to show their ID to election officials, according to the Secretary of State’s office.
The Benton County Election Commission met in Rogers Tuesday afternoon to review absentee and provisional ballots. Of the roughly 1,000 provisional ballots cast and reviewed Tuesday, 107 were accepted, while the remaining ballots were rejected for a variety of reasons, including voters not being registered to vote, being registered to vote in a different county or not presenting a photo ID.
“When a voter appears at a polling site and they are not on the registration roll, the provisional process is to provide a voted ballot so that further investigation can be done if there’s a question, particularly by the voter, that they should be on that roll,” Harrell said.
Harrell has worked in the county clerk’s office for about 20 years and said every election there are voters who come to a voting place after registering to vote at the Department of Motor Vehicles, only to find they’re not on the rolls. She said 10 to 20 voters in her county had an issue this year.
“If you are that person, that doesn’t matter if you are one in 10 or one in a thousand, it’s a big deal to you,” Harrell said. “We want it to never happen.”
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Registering at the DMV is the start of the voter registration process, not the completion, Harrell said. Arkansans aren’t fully registered to vote until they receive confirmation from their county clerk, and while the DMV is supposed to encourage registrants to follow up with their county clerk, people don’t always do so, she said.
Sometimes when people register at the DMV, the data is not transferred to a specific county, so it ends up in a large database of registered voters, Harrell said. If an Arkansan has this issue and they vote a provisional ballot, Harrell said election officials generally can locate the voter in the database to confirm their eligibility and make sure their votes are counted.
In August, the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration notified tens of thousands of voters who registered when they obtained new driver’s licenses that their registration information might have been out of date, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported. The discrepancies resulted from a software error that prevented DMV offices from transferring recently updated voter registration data to county clerks between Jan. 1 and March 31.
Get Loud Arkansas, a nonprofit voter advocacy organization, had been warning state officials that there were glitches in the process of registering to vote or updating registration information at the DMV, deputy director Kristin Foster said at the time.
Foster said Monday she was concerned that voters who were affected by the software error but did not get the memo from the finance department would not have their votes counted.
“There are definitely ways the state could have been more proactive to make sure these folks don’t get disqualified,” she said.
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Garland County didn’t see more provisional ballots than usual this election cycle, Election Coordinator Gene Haley said Tuesday. He added that the DMVs’ computer systems are incompatible with those of the Secretary of State’s office and that he has urged legislative action to fix this.
Both Haley and County Clerk Sarah Smith said several Garland County voters contacted them to update their registration information in August after the finance department made the software error public knowledge.
“Every election cycle, we have people saying they registered at the DMV but we didn’t get it, and I didn’t notice it being more of a problem this election cycle than any other elections,” Smith said.
Meanwhile, the Pulaski County Election Commission received 1,251 provisional ballots, mostly from people who mistakenly believed they were correctly registered, said Ternesha Womack, community outreach specialist for the Pulaski County Circuit Clerk.
Harrell said county clerks across the state have discussed better ways to educate voters on the importance of confirming their registration with their county clerk. Harrell, for example, would like to require driver’s license offices to post a QR code that would take newly registered voters to Voter View, a website where they can check their voter registration status.
Voters can also use Voter View to track their absentee or provisional ballots, but there is no means of tracking in-person ballots, something Foster said people consistently ask Get Loud about.
The Benton County Election Commission on Tuesday disqualified some provisional ballots because voters who moved to a new county didn’t transfer their registration by the deadline, which was the Friday before the election. Harrell said she’d like to see that deadline extended through Election Day.
“If you are already a registered voter in the state, I don’t understand the problem with transferring up through Election Day,” she said.