The number of incorrect records discovered in the state's felony database was between 4,000 and 5,000, according to an official who said Saturday that he misspoke the day before when he gave a much larger figure during an interview.
Saturday's edition of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette was led with an article about 20,000 erroneous records in the database, which contained 193,549 records when it was given to the secretary of state's office for use in determining who to strike from another statewide database, one of voters.
That 20,000 figure was itself erroneous. Brad Cazort, repository administrator for the Arkansas Crime Information Center, said Saturday that when being interviewed Friday by a reporter, he misstated the number of cases in the statewide criminal database erroneously listed as felonies.
"I had just gotten off the phone with this researcher from the University of Texas who was wanting access to about 20,000 records and we were talking about whether we can do that or not," Cazort said Saturday in a phone interview with a reporter. "Then I was talking to you and that number was just stuck in my head."
After a review by the Arkansas Crime Information Center of its database, the actual number of incorrect records totaled between 4,000 and 5,000. That number is consistent with what Cazort has said since late July, when the first articles were written about the secretary of state's office using the felony records to update its voter database.
Cazort has been with the Arkansas Crime Information Center for 11 years. No disciplinary action is planned for Cazort because of the mistaken number, said Jay Winters, director of the center.
The errors in the criminal database came about many years ago because municipal courts listed felonies in their paperwork, which the center used to compile the criminal database. However, those municipal courts -- now called district courts -- cannot rule that someone is a felon, Cazort said.
Winters said Saturday that every record entered into the system is checked by at least two people. He confirmed that there were between 4,000 and 5,000 records affected by the error.
The errors, which came from incorrect documentation from the courts, have been corrected.
"They were records that were from what were called municipal court back then and they showed to be felonies on the record," Winters said. "We looked at the records. The records showed it was a felony. So the people that entered that, just entered what the order said."
The incorrect records stemmed from decades-old convictions. Employees are now trained and know that felony convictions cannot come out of district court, he said.
Cazort said no other widespread errors are known to exist in the database. The Arkansas Crime Information Center does get complaints about inaccuracies, which it investigates and then corrects records if necessary.
Secretary of State Mark Martin's office used the database from the center to flag potential felons in the statewide voter database.
Martin's office matched 7,730 voters to the 193,549 felony records in the center's database.
County clerks have been working to determine the voting eligibility of those 7,730 people. Some were not convicted of felonies. Some had been pardoned by the governor. Others had long since gone through the process of restoring their voting rights.
To periodically update the voter database by flagging felons who had lost the right to vote, the secretary of state's office had relied on information generated by Arkansas Community Correction. However, after the Community Correction employee who processed the data died, updates lapsed in 2014. The next update was made in June this year with data from the Arkansas Crime Information Center, which didn't indicate which felons had regained the right to vote.
According to its website, the Arkansas Crime Information Center provides information technology services to law enforcement and other criminal-justice agencies in Arkansas. Its database is used by criminal-justice agencies in more than 250 locations in Arkansas and is connected to crime-information systems in other states and with the FBI. The center also collects and publishes statistics on crime and manages the crime victim notification system and the state sex-offender registry.
Winters, a former Pope County sheriff, has headed the crime information center since Feb. 19, 2012, when Gov. Mike Beebe was in office. Winters was retained when Asa Hutchinson became governor in January 2015.
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