Inquiry urged on vote cast illegally

LITTLE ROCK — Pulaski County’s Election Commission asked the prosecutor to investigate an incident in which a Little Rock man who wasn’t registered to vote inserted his provisional ballot into a voting machine, causing it to be counted.

The episode, which took place during a special primary runoff in February, contributed to a tied race between House District 34 candidates Joy Springer and Ryan Davis. The tie was ultimately resolved by one absentee vote mailed from Sweden, giving Springer the victory.

County election board members signed off Friday on a memo urging Prosecutor Larry Jegley to look into the balloting issue and “take appropriate action to enforce the election laws of the State,” the document says.

The move comes after months of discussion at board meetings. Commission chairwoman Evelyn Gomez said Tuesday the matter is important to pursue “because of fairness.”

“One of the single most important things we can do as an election commission is ensure honest, fair, free elections for the people,” said Gomez, who is a Republican appointee. “Because every vote counts, it is fundamental[ly] unfair to qualified electors to dilute their vote (their voice) by allowing illegal votes to be cast.”

According to the memo, a man arrived to vote at a polling place at Saint Mark Baptist Church in Little Rock on Feb. 11, but poll workers couldn’t find him in the poll book or in the county’s registered voter database.

Under those circumstances, an Arkansan is allowed to complete a form and fill out a provisional ballot, which is supposed to be sealed in an envelope for later review, according to procedures outlined in state elections law. Instead, after filling out the form, the man marked his ballot and fed it into a vote-counting machine, the memo said.

The man’s intent when he inserted the ballot, as well as poll workers’ role in the event, hasn’t been clear from discussions at public meetings. Poll workers didn’t prevent him from inserting his ballot, the memo said — some were busy with other voters, and one didn’t know a provisional ballot had been issued.

The man is named in the memo, but he isn’t naming him because he has not been charged with a crime. He didn’t answer calls at a number listed for him.

In its review of provisional ballots the following day, clerk’s office staff members determined the man wasn’t registered to vote in the state, “and therefore the ballot that he inserted into the ballot scanner was invalid and his act of doing so was in violation of the law,” election commissioners wrote.

The incident earned the ire of Springer, who questioned commissioners about the election’s handling, reports said. One change Pulaski County election commissioners have enacted since: provisional ballots will be marked going forward so the same situation can’t happen again.

Poll workers are trained not to insert provisional ballots into machines, Pulaski County elections director Bryan Poe said.

What happened “clearly made our task quite a bit more difficult than it needed to be,” Poe said at a March 9 meeting. “And obviously we do not approve of anybody casting illegal ballots.”

As well as taking place during a closely contested election, the episode took place in a year when election officials nationwide have been on tenterhooks about errors and mishaps because of the impending vote for the presidency, and new challenges at the polls because of the global coronavirus outbreak.

Generally, voter fraud remains rare in the U.S. and in Arkansas, according to one database compiled by Arizona State University researchers. It’s count found just six reported instances in the state between 2000 and 2012, and five of those six concerned campaign officials, not voters.