County clerks said they are continuing to work their way through figuring out who has the right to vote after the state incorrectly flagged thousands of people as felons to be removed from voter rolls.
The county clerks must get their voter lists prepared in time for school elections in September and November's general election, in which about 1 million Arkansans are expected to vote for president.
Some of the state's 75 county clerks have enlisted local officials to gather complete data on the state records, and in five counties -- Pulaski, Benton, Drew, Baxter and Independence -- clerks took the extra step of asking the secretary of state's office to reset their databases to how they were before the update that caused the problems.
"I think they should lean in favor of the voter," Gov. Asa Hutchinson said Thursday when asked how he would advise county clerks. "We don't want to inadvertently exclude somebody, and so if there's any question, they should vote."
The flawed data were sent to county clerks in June by the secretary of state's office, in conjunction with the Arkansas Crime Information Center. Statewide, there were 193,549 people on the center's updated list of all felons in its system. It is up to the clerks' offices to verify the information, a spokesman for the secretary of state said.
"There's an old saying that you can't unring a bell, and that's where we are," said Pulaski County Clerk Larry Crane. "We have been diligently working through every individual whose name was tagged in the original process, and we are heading toward the end."
Arkansas law allows felons to regain the right to vote once they are discharged from probation or parole, have paid all probation or parole fees and have satisfied all terms of imprisonment and paid all court costs, fines or restitution. A felon also can have his crime pardoned and become eligible to vote again.
Amendment 51 to the Arkansas Constitution states that when convicted felons show proof of that information to the county clerk, they shall be added back to voter registries.
Crane is trying to figure out which convicted felons have already gone through that process. The Arkansas Crime Information Center data stretch back to the 1970s, and there is no field in that data to note if a felon has gone through the voting-rights restoration process or not.
"For years, the secretary of state's office under several secretaries of state have been using information from the Community Correction Department and have used information that had been provided from clerks and other sources," Crane said.
"I believe that someone read Amendment 51 where it mentions using [Arkansas Crime Information Center] data as a basis for the felony records, and I believe [that] information can be supplemented by other data to adjust those records."
According to Amendment 51, the secretary of state's office must maintain a computerized list that "shall be coordinated with other state agency records on felony status as maintained by the Arkansas Crime Information Center, records on death as maintained by the State Department of Health, and driver's license records maintained by the Office of Driver Services."
Chris Powell, spokesman for the secretary of state's office, said the office does not "have the ability or authority to verify the data. We send the information to the counties as potential matches. Verification is done at the county level."
"Historically, including during prior administrations, the data had been obtained from the wrong source, and we were attempting to correct the problem, per our obligation in the Constitution," he added.
But Brad Cazort, repository administrator for the Arkansas Crime Information Center, said the center provided the data in accordance with a request from the secretary of state's office. The request went beyond updating records that were several months old.
"We're in this position because they asked for the entire database," he said.
The Pulaski County clerk's office has reached out to Arkansas Community Correction for a list of everyone on parole or probation, said Dina Tyler, deputy director of the department. That list contains 53,542 names.
Other clerks are checking with local officials to piece together the necessary information.
"We actually partnered with our probation and parole office and have them check all the names versus their database to see who had been fulfilled [their sentences], who was still actually serving on parole or in prison," said Craighead County Clerk Kade Holliday.
The state data flagged 153 people in Craighead County. The probation and parole office said 92 of those people had completed their sentences. Holliday said his office couldn't prove that around 60 of the total had completed their sentences, so letters were sent out to them.
"I would have hated to be the person who took away 92 individuals' rights who should have had those rights in the first place," he said.
Holliday said he regularly works with the circuit clerk's office to get county data that's more recent than what comes from the secretary of state's office.
"Anytime there is a sentencing done for a felony, they automatically send us the sentencing order for that individual so we can go ahead and update our information, almost in real time," he said.
Dana Caler, elections administrator and voter supervisor for Benton County, said she also is working with local officials.
"We're checking our records first. We're going through our court records, which are online," she said. "We're also having one of our probation offices check for pardons because we have a lot that have been pardoned."
Benton County received 485 names. She's down to about 300.
Some of the names were flagged because of divorce records, not felonies, Caler said.
"My goal is to have everything done by early voting for general election," she said. "It's lengthy. Right now with filing and school elections getting ready to start, I'm only able to have one or two of my girls being able to work on it consistently, so it's not something I can put a bunch of people on because of everything else going on."
She noted that if a felon is incorrectly flagged as not eligible to vote, the person can still cast a provisional ballot.
Veronica Wallace, a deputy clerk in Bradley County, said she received 33 names. That's more than she can remember receiving before.
Her office sent letters and removed eight people. One man went to the office -- with documentation -- and his rights were restored. She hasn't heard from the other seven.
She said she did not plan to remove people on the basis of decades-old convictions noted in the new state data.
"The convictions were so old -- 20 or more years old -- that I was leery of just removing them," she said.
If they had moved in the past decade or two, they wouldn't receive a written notice to their old address, she said.
"I just used precaution and left those really old convictions alone," she said. "Those that are more recent, those are the ones that I removed."
A Section on 08/05/2016