Between the lines: Taking a vote

State botches inmate report to county clerks

Thousands of people may have been incorrectly removed from Arkansas voter registration lists.

Or not.

No one seems to know for sure which county clerks around Arkansas may have already purged the voter lists under the clerks' control.

The people affected here are those who shouldn't have been identified as felons in a recent update of data from the Arkansas Crime Information Center.

The county clerks in each of Arkansas' 75 counties got the names of people identified by the ACIC as ineligible to vote from the secretary of state's office.

It was then left to each county's clerk to determine whether to purge their records. Some clerks have. Others have not. Affected voters should have been notified if their names are removed.

The problem is, while many thousands of the people on these lists are felons who have lost their right to vote, others included in the list should not have been on it. They have never been convicted of a felony and were flagged by error.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported the problems encountered in a recent update of ACIC data on felons.

The resulting mess could trigger lawsuits before it is cleared up.

Curiously, this turn of events seems to have begun months and months ago when a state employee for the state Department of Correction died. He had been responsible for keeping track of new felons and sending that information on to the secretary of state's office, which in turn notified the county clerks' offices.

After about 20 months passed with no updates, the secretary of state's office looked into why it wasn't getting updates anymore.

According to the news coverage, the reports stopped because no one at the Department of Correction knew how to do their late colleague's job. It then turned out, on further investigation, that the secretary of state was instead supposed to get the information about disqualified felons from the Arkansas Crime Information Center.

When the secretary of state reached out to ACIC for the information, the office got new data lists with erroneous information that included something like 4,000 convictions out of municipal courts. The judgments apparently indicated they were felony convictions, but municipal courts can't convict persons of a felony.

These were mixed in with the names of people who actually have been convicted of felonies and some felons who have since regained their right to vote, all of which were forwarded to the county clerks.

Again, this is a mess county clerks must untangle. But it was clearly triggered by the secretary of state's reliance on data from the Arkansas Crime Information Center.

Naturally, the different agencies seem to be shoving blame off on someone else.

ACIC notes that its data reflects what municipal courts entered, for example, suggesting that's where some of the errors began.

And the secretary of state says it is the clerks' job to verify whether any voter's name should be removed before striking it.

However future notifications are handled, the reporting agencies need to be sure they're passing on correct information to the county clerks before they strike names from the voter rolls.

The problem just needs to be fixed. Otherwise someone who shouldn't be disenfranchised may be.

Commentary on 07/27/2016

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