Election commission removes mall as polling site

The Hot Springs Mall will not be a polling site for the Nov. 6 general election, a decision the Garland County Election Commission made Tuesday to avoid any controversy caused by the county’s Republican Party committee headquarters’ proximity to the polling location.

A letter members of the county’s Democratic Party committee sent the State Board of Election Commissioners last month brought the controversy to a head. The letter, written by District 4 Justice of the Peace Denise Marion, was styled as a complaint, but the county election commission said nothing actionable had occurred to give the complainants standing.

The state election code prohibits electioneering within 100 feet of the entrance to a polling place or inside the same building where votes are cast. Next month’s election would have been the county’s first with a polling site and party headquarters inside the same building.

The mall was used as an early voting location and an election

day vote center in the May primaries. The 1,239 ballots cast there made it the third most frequented of the county’s four early voting sites.

The county commission said it will try to find another south Hot Springs location before Tuesday, the deadline for counties to change the list of polling places used in the previous election. Tuesday is also the voter registration deadline.

The mall replaced the airport at Hot Springs Memorial Field after Southern Airways moved into the space used during the 2016 elections.

County Republicans said they began leasing space in the mall in July, receiving the county election commission’s blessing before moving its headquarters into the building. It had been meeting at the First Church of the Nazarene after its previous headquarters in the 600 block of Ouachita Avenue changed ownership last year.

County Election Commission Chairman Gene Haley said Republican headquarters is 400 feet from the polling site on the northwest side of the mall, and the statute does not define what a building is. The county commission maintains the mall is a series of buildings, and that the electioneering statute’s intent is to regulate campaign activity outside of courthouses. It solicited a clarification from the state election board, but its attorney declined to make a definitive determination.

“Our opinion at the time was there was no conflict,” Haley, describing the county commission’s position when approached by county Republicans about their intent to lease space in the mall, said at Tuesday’s commission meeting. “We always looked at electioneering law as 100 feet, and (Republican headquarters) is about 400 feet from our location.

“The letter of the law does say in the building but doesn’t define what a building is.”

Cortney McKee, one of the signatories to the letter Marion wrote the state board last month, told the county committee Tuesday that county Republicans moved their headquarters to the mall knowing it was a polling location.

“The law has been on the books,” said McKee, the Democratic nominee for District 9 justice of the peace. “With all the empty buildings around the county and city, it was just not a reasonable decision. It had already been listed as a polling site.”

Matt McKee, the District 9 incumbent and chairman of the county Republican committee, offered to remove signs from headquarter windows and have party officials use the rear entrance during early and election day voting hours.

Responding to a suggestion that such actions would impose a hardship on the party, Matt McKee said, “It really would, but if people are going to be unreasonable.”

Haley said rather than risk having to respond to an actionable complaint, the commission would be better served striking the mall as a polling location. A member of the state board’s legislative committee, Haley said he will lobby for an amended statute that defines building.

“One party blaming the other, it doesn’t mean anything to me,” said Haley, one of two Republicans on the three-member county commission. “We’re going to conduct the elections as fair as possible. I don’t blame the county committee for choosing that space. It’s just a matter of how do we proceed until we can get the law changed.”

Tuesday’s action leaves the county with three early voting sites when early voting begins Oct. 22. The election commission building, 649A Ouachita Ave., and Faith Fellowship Church, 3213 Highway 7 north, will remain on the list.

LakePointe Church, 1343 Albert Pike Road, is a new addition, replacing Piney Grove Methodist Church, 2963 Airport Road, as the early voting location for western Garland County. All three early voting sites will also be election day vote centers.

If the commission cannot secure a fourth early voting site by Tuesday, Haley said he’s confident three locations can process a large enough percentage of the total turnout to avoid long wait times on election day. The county’s 140 electronic ballot marking devices can handle about 20,000 election day voters if voters take five minutes on average to cast a ballot, putting the onus on early voting to receive the largest percentage of turnout.

The 6,640 ballots cast during

13 days of early voting in the May primaries and nonpartisan general election accounted for 52.9 percent of the 12,536 vote total. Early voting accounted for 40.7 percent of the 13,228 ballots cast during the previous federal midterm elections contested in May, leading to long lines on election day.

The fallout from the May 2014 elections led to the vote center model the county has used during the last three federal elections, allowing voters to choose one of 24 election day voting locations rather than being assigned one according to their precinct.

Election day turnout exceeded the early vote total by almost 20 percent, 12,691 to 9,165, during the March 2016 primaries, the county’s first election with vote centers. The trend tilted in the general election that November, with the

27,294 ballots cast during early voting accounting for 66.2 percent of turnout.

“In the past four years we’ve made a lot of progress as far as problems we’ve had with elections in the past, the long lines, equipment and all that kind of stuff,” Haley said. “We’ve got a good track record right now. I certainly don’t want anything to harm that. I don’t want to spend time defending (using the mall as a polling location), because it may come down to that.”