The Pulaski County clerk's office has completed the onerous task of sifting through flawed voter-registration data it received in June from the secretary of state's office.
The state had flagged 1,730 names in Pulaski County for removal from voter rolls because of felony convictions, per state law. After county staff members analyzed the list of names, they determined that 1,119, or 65 percent of them, were flagged erroneously.
Of the 1,717,926 registered voters across the state, a total of 7,730 people were flagged through the flawed voter data, a state spokesman has said, including people who have never been convicted of a felony and felons who had legally regained their right to vote.
For 10 weeks, Pulaski County Clerk Larry Crane and 14 employees spent about 500 hours laboring over the data the county had received.
"It's been a lot of bloody work," said Jason Kennedy, assistant chief deputy of the clerk's office.
"It hijacked our summer, and a lot of the preparations we were trying to get done for November got shelved," Kennedy said, referring to the Nov. 8 general election.
The county staff members went through five rounds of analyzing the flagged names. They reviewed reams upon reams of court records to verify registration statuses, a task that included poring through old boxes of records from the court's pre-digital archives.
Throughout the past week, the remaining 611 Pulaski County voters flagged by the state -- those the county determined were felons who had not regained their right to vote -- received letters notifying them of their annulled registration status.
Crane said he still expects to field phone calls from some of those 611, who will protest their removal from the voter rolls. Since the notices were sent out, he said, his office has already corrected one account after receiving a phone call about it.
"Once the secretary of state gave us a list and said, 'we think these are felons' -- whether or not they actually are -- the obligation fell on us to ferret it out every way that we possibly could," Crane said.
But according to Crane, the state offered no guidance for the task.
"Every county clerk could approach it under their own management style, and under what they believed was the appropriate methodology to get it done," Crane said. "Some clerks sent out a letter to everyone on their list and said, 'It has been determined you are a felon; if you're not, let us know.'"
Crane decided to do the work on the front end and correct the list before sending out notices, to remove the burden from the people incorrectly flagged. His office spent more than $2,000 for overtime hours that went into correcting the state's list.
Issues over the data arose when the secretary of state's office began collecting felon data from the Arkansas Crime Information Center instead of from Arkansas Community Correction. In June, the state election division sent out the new list, provided by the Crime Information Center, to each county clerk's office.
More than a week after clerks received the list, the state advised clerks of the potentially corrupted data and instructed them to proceed with caution.
The secretary of state's office later said in a letter this month that county clerks should have conducted independent investigations before removing any people from voter rolls.
The state has offered no further assistance, Crane said.
"They did not give any indication that they were willing to attempt to undo what they had done, or to work with anyone to get that done," Crane said.
"This has been a lot more difficult than it needed to be or should have been," he added.
Metro on 08/29/2016