Voters walk into cast their ballots at the Center Point Church on Nov. 8, 2022 in Orem, Utah. (George Frey/Getty Images)
Voter participation in Arkansas is, in a word, abysmal. According to a U.S. Election Assistance Commission report, we were dead last in voter registration (63% of eligible residents) and voter turnout (54%) in the 2020 election, which means about a third of adult Arkansans made decisions for everyone else.
So if I told you that a grassroots group had come up with an innovative way to tackle this problem by making voter registration easier and more efficient, you might think that the people charged with running our election machinery — Secretary of State John Thurston and the Arkansas State Board of Election Commissioners — would do everything they could to support it.
You would be wrong. Instead, they’ve done a good deal to impede it — in the process, disregarding the attorney general, incurring $250,000 in legal costs, and being rebuked by a federal judge, who said they likely violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The origins of this dispute reach back to January, when Get Loud Arkansas, a group founded by former state Sen. Joyce Elliott to promote voting and civic engagement, launched a new online registration tool.
A potential voter came to its website, entered the information required by state law, and provided a signature by either uploading it or signing with a stylus or finger. The tool inserted the information into a registration form (the same form that can be downloaded and printed from the Secretary of State’s own website), which was printed out with the signature and sent to the county clerk in their county. Between January and May, about 500 new voters used the tool to register.
Get Loud had previously offered this tool without the electronic signature, which required mailing the completed form to the registrant for a so-called “wet signature” and then mailing it to the clerk. But in tracking the applications, the group found that many potential voters didn’t follow through with those extra steps.
Kristin Foster, Get Loud’s deputy director, said the electronic signature tool also made registrations more accurate by flagging mistakes or missing information before they were submitted and enabled the group to register more people with fewer volunteers. For instance, a single volunteer could go into a high school and give eligible 18-year-olds a QR code that directed them to the registration form, and they could fill it out themselves, sign and submit, rather than requiring a volunteer to work with each student individually.
Get Loud says it checked with Thurston’s office three times about whether electronic signatures were acceptable and were assured, three times, that there was no rule against them. But in February — just two days after the Arkansas Times ran a story about what Get Loud was doing — Thurston sent a two-paragraph letter to county clerks advising them that he “strongly” recommended that they stop accepting registrations with electronic signatures.
Some clerks followed that advice, while others didn’t. Meanwhile, Thurston asked Attorney General Tim Griffin whether Arkansas law allowed electronic signatures — and Griffin, no doubt to Thurston’s surprise and chagrin, said it did.
Undeterred, Thurston got the state elections board to adopt a “wet signature” requirement, which was eventually endorsed by the Arkansas Legislative Council. It was put on hold by a federal judge but then revived by a federal appeals court.
Two rationales put forward by the board for the rule are particularly rich. First, it argued that the rule merely preserves the status quo, even though a specific “wet signature” requirement didn’t exist until the board created one. Second, it argued the rule was necessary because clerks in different counties were treating electronic signatures differently — an anomaly caused by Thurston’s letter that the board could also have solved by simply following Griffin’s advice.
The board also claimed Get Loud’s tool was, in effect, an online registration system, which only the DMV and some social service agencies are authorized to operate in Arkansas (as required by federal law). While that raises a different question about why 42 other states have fully online registration for all voters and we don’t, it’s also a mischaracterization of Get Loud’s process, which uses electronic signatures on paper forms, not submissions made online.
When Get Loud sued in federal court to block the rule, Griffin recused himself from defending Thurston and the board because he had already taken a position on electronic signatures. Legislators then agreed to spend up to $250,000 to hire outside lawyers to defend Thurston’s decision to ignore Griffin’s legal advice. (One of Thurston’s court filings rather archly notes that Griffin’s opinions aren’t binding and that Thurston isn’t required to follow opinions “that are clearly incorrect.”)
On Aug. 28, U.S. District Judge Timothy L. Brooks in Fayetteville put the “wet signature” requirement on hold for a different reason — that it is not material in determining whether a person is qualified to vote under Arkansas law and thus likely violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Get Loud resumed using the tool, only to be stopped again after Thurston got the U.S. 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to intervene last Friday.
Good public policy surrounding voting seems pretty simple. We should want our elections to be fair and secure, and we should want to encourage as many people as possible to participate. Electronic signatures — which are used on tax forms and myriad other transactions here in the 21st century — do nothing to threaten the former and do much to promote the latter.
If Thurston and the board were as concerned about our woeful rates of voter participation as they should be, they would have found a way to get to yes on Get Loud’s tool, rather than falling back on tortured excuses to say no and fighting the group in court.
Why, it’s almost like some folks in power don’t want more people to participate in our democracy for some reason. How curious …
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX