Flawed data flagged 7,730 people in Arkansas to be removed from voter rolls, a spokesman for the secretary of state said Friday.
That data have caused headaches for county clerks, who have been left to work out what's accurate. Some on the list are felons who have not yet taken the steps to regain their right to vote and must be kept off voter rolls, but others on the list have not committed a felony or have already had their rights restored.
Interviews with a handful of county clerks show that they are removing only a fraction of those people. In Pulaski County -- where nearly 2,000 of those named on the state's list reside -- about 20 percent will be removed after staff members investigated each person, said Jason Kennedy, assistant chief deputy of the clerk's office.
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. The data were previously generated by Arkansas Community Correction, but when the Community Correction employee who normally processed the data died, updates lapsed.
After reading Amendment 51 to the Arkansas Constitution, Secretary of State Mark Martin's office determined that it should request the information from the Arkansas Crime Information Center.
In Pulaski County, two people in the county clerk's office normally review flags raised by Martin's office in the voter database. Kennedy said 15 people have been involved -- including employees from other offices -- and they have been working overtime for weeks, checking into each person identified by the secretary of state's office as potentially needing removal from voter rolls.
Staff members have found a reason to remove fewer than 400 people, he said. The rest -- about 1,600 people also flagged as potentially ineligible to vote -- had completed their sentences, were incorrectly labeled or were flagged for decades-old infractions of which county staff members were not able to access documentation.
The secretary of state's office "could have come to us and sought out somebody with court experience and voter experience ... talked to them, gotten their input on how to ask [the Arkansas Crime Information Center] for the correct information," Kennedy said. "Any query you run in a computer is only as good as the query you design.
"If you ask a computer a really broad question, it's going to give you a lot of junk data," he said.
'Some errors'
According to correspondence released under the state Freedom of Information Act by the secretary of state's office and the Arkansas Crime Information Center, officials from both offices had spent months trying to convert and process the data before it was sent to county clerks.
The initial request for the data was made by the secretary of state's office via a phone call, said Brad Cazort, repository administrator for the Arkansas Crime Information Center.
Email discussions on data formatting started on April 13 and ended June 3.
After the data -- which contained 193,549 names -- was sent to the secretary of state's office, the information was merged using a computer program into the statewide voter registration system as flags for county clerks to sort out. The secretary of state is an elected office, as are each of the county clerks. They each have a role in overseeing the state's elections.
There were 7,730 matches, said Chris Powell, a spokesman for the secretary of state's office. There are 1,717,926 registered voters in the state's 75 counties.
The flawed data was sent June 27.
On June 30, Mitchell Minyard, a programmer analyst in the elections division of the secretary of state's office, told clerks in an email that there might be problems with the data.
"For the time being, please wait for further correspondence before working any more of this batch," he said. "We're discussing the raised issues with [the Arkansas Crime Information Center]."
On July 6, Peyton Murphy, assistant director of elections, sent a letter to clerks stating that "there is the potential for some errors to occur." He told clerks to proceed with caution.
The problems generally fell into two categories. Some individuals have a felony conviction but have since been discharged or pardoned. Others have never had a felony conviction, he said.
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.
"We knew that bringing the felon file process into compliance with Amendment 51 would not be without its glitches, but are certain that the process will become easier over time, as future batches will only include new convictions," Murphy said in the letter.
Several county clerks interviewed said they did not know such a large update was coming or that it had the potential for significant error.
The Arkansas Crime Information Center has offered to help county clerks, but Cazort said his office agency has received only about 20 calls.
Powell of the secretary of state's office said the methodology for sending the data would not be changed.
"We are working with [the Arkansas Crime Information Center], and the way some of the data is extracted may be adjusted," he said.
Holly Dickson, legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas, said her organization is considering a lawsuit.
"I don't see that there would be any relief for the voters any other way," she said. "Disenfranchising one voter is bad enough, but here's a slew."
The secretary of state and the Arkansas Board of Election Commissioners should be taking proactive steps, she said.
"What could they do? Go in and audit the faulty information that they just provided. Unwind these transactions that are disenfranchising voters. Try to conduct some damage control on behalf of the people," she said.
School elections will be held in September, and the general election, which includes the presidential election, is Nov. 8.
Process
Felon data is one of three types of information collected and disseminated by the secretary of state's office to county clerks.
Recent deaths are sent monthly by the Department of Heath, said Shirley Louie, state registrar, deputy state epidemiologist and director of the Center for Public Health Practice, in an email. Kennedy confirmed the schedule.
Kennedy and other county clerk staff members said offices daily receive new voter registrations from the Office of Motor Vehicles through the secretary of state's office.
The felon data was long overdue, Kennedy said.
"The last two or three years, it's gone from being a monthly report to almost quarterly report to almost a biannual report," he said.
The last time Pulaski County received an update was in the fall of last year.
When the secretary of state's office receives the lists of felons, recently deceased and new voters, it merges the data into the statewide voter registration database via computer. County clerks then receive update notifications through software provided by the secretary of state's office.
Though the secretary of state's office flags people's information and generates reports in the statewide database, county clerks ultimately decide what to do with the information, according to various clerks and Powell.
Under Amendment 51, state officials do not have the authority to remove anyone from voter rolls, Powell said.
Saline County Clerk Doug Curtis said his office has removed no names from voter rolls. The county attorney is reviewing the names and is going through court records and other outlets, he said.
"We're not in a big hurry to go through it, and until we've gone through it, we're just not going to take anybody off the rolls," he said.
Columbia County Deputy Clerk Barbara Smith said the data indicated that 144 people should be classified felons. After working with the county probation office, Smith said the office determined all but 28 or 29 of the names had completed the steps to regain their voting rights.
"There was not anyone on there [on the list] that had not been a felon," Smith said.
Smith said the lists of names she receives from the secretary of state's office usually contains about 10 felons, so when she saw the much larger number, she immediately sent the list to the probation office before removing any names from the voter rolls.
"I looked at it for a minute and saw that the first one had been redeemed ... so I immediately sent to the local office," she said.
Craighead County Clerk Kade Holliday said there has been one "silver lining" to the flawed data his office received.
"There's actually been a number of individuals come in that fulfilled their sentences that didn't know they were allowed to re-register to vote," he said.
Publicity surrounding the issue matter informed them otherwise.
"We had a lady, she actually committed her felony back in the '70s, finished her sentence in the early '90s, and hasn't voted since," he said. "She didn't think she was ever allowed to vote again."
Information for this article was contributed by John Moritz of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
A Section on 08/06/2016