Mixed messages from the Arkansas secretary of state’s office about the validity of electronic signatures on voter registration forms is causing confusion around a clever shortcut that’s helped get hundreds of Arkansans registered to vote.
Secretary of State John Thurston sent out a letter to Arkansas county clerks on Feb. 28 advising them not to accept voter registration forms that have been filled out and signed electronically.
That directive is at odds with previous advice from Thurston’s office to Get Loud Arkansas, former state Sen. Joyce Elliott‘s effort to get more Arkansans on the rolls and to the polls. Federal law backs up the validity of electronic signatures, and Get Loud Arkansas will keep on offering the option, Elliott said.
“We are carrying on doing what we are doing because we’re convinced we are right about what we are doing,” she said.
County clerks are elected officials in their own right, and it’s not clear all will follow Thurston’s recommendation. At least one, Pulaski County Clerk Terri Hollingsworth, said she planned to stay the course.
“I appreciate that our Secretary of State, John Thurston, shared his position on not to use applications with electronic signatures. But as the official voter registrar of Pulaski County, it’s my decision to make and we will follow the law,” Hollingsworth said.
“Our office will continue to accept and process voter registration applications that have electronic signatures,” she said, noting that the clerk’s office “accepts voter registration applications from the DMV with electronic signatures.”
Forty-two states, plus Washington, D.C., and Guam, offer online registration. Arkansas does not. Instead, would-be voters fill out an old-school paper form and submit a physical copy to their county clerk, or fill out their applications electronically at the DMV thanks to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.
Multiple efforts to allow online voter registration in Arkansas have failed over the years amid conservatives’ warnings about voter integrity and threats to our democracy. Arkansas’s voter-unfriendly laws correlate with our bottom-of-the-heap voter registration and turnout rates.
Get Loud Arkansas aimed to make the process less arduous by relying on the Uniform Electronic Transaction Act of 2001, a federal law that says no “signature, contract, or other record” can be denied solely because a signature is in electronic form.
With this law in mind, and advice from their attorneys that they’d be on solid ground, Get Loud Arkansas debuted an online voter application option in early 2023. It’s been a success.
“We’ve had 300 registration forms submitted with electronic signatures since January,” Get Loud Arkansas Deputy Director Kristin Foster said Thursday.
County clerks across the state accepted these registrations without issue prior to Thurston’s Feb. 28 letter, Elliott reported.
Young voters especially are embracing the convenience of being able to fill out and sign their applications online, then have Get Loud Arkansas print out the applications and deliver them to the county clerks’ offices where they need to go, Elliott said.
Confusingly, the Arkansas secretary of state’s office seemed to have given them a tentative go-ahead earlier. Josh Bridges, Arkansas’s assistant director of elections with the secretary of state’s office, said in a Feb. 14 email exchange with Foster that a digital signature was legally the same as an inked, or “wet,” signature. He also cautioned it was a “grey area”:
In a February email exchange, Josh Bridges at the Arkansas Secretary of State’s office suggested digital signatures and ink signatures are the same. But he hedged a lot.
You can read the full email exchange between Foster and Bridges here.
Arkansas Times reporter Mary Hennigan highlighted Get Loud’s success with electronically assisted voter registration in a Feb. 26 story. Foster said she thinks it’s no coincidence the secretary of state’s letter came soon afterwards
“It was a huge success with high school seniors. Previously, we would get four or five paper registrations at high school voter drives, but now we usually get 30 to 40 using the online application,” Foster said. “Personally, I believe that’s why they reversed their position two days after the AT article highlighted how popular it was with young people.”
Elliott found out about Thurston’s Feb. 28 message to county clerks when a clerk reached out to her. No one at the Arkansas secretary of state’s office contacted Get Loud Arkansas about the shift, Elliott said. “To this moment he has not said anything to us about it.”
Foster said she kind of saw it coming. “It’s been really disappointing after all the work we did to make sure that we were compliant,” she said. Still, “we’re not surprised by this. We were surprised they were as supportive as they were to begin with.”
Chris Powell, spokesman for the secretary of state, provided this statement from Thurston:
“I have asked counties not to accept these online voter registration applications. There are currently two accepted methods to register to vote. One method is through mail-in applications, and the other method is through the Office of Motor Vehicles. At this time, Arkansas law does not allow for an online application. There was legislation in 2019 that attempted to establish an online voter registration system. That legislation failed. Therefore, based on current law, I do not believe such applications are valid.”
So what happens next? The county clerks responsible for registering voters are elected locally, not hired by the secretary of state. Thurston recommends not accepting electronic signatures, but it doesn’t demand that they stop. Will other county clerks join Hollingsworth in continuing to do so?
“The secretary of state is the chief election officer in Arkansas, and county clerks rely on him for direction and guidance,” veteran election watcher Susan Inman said. Inman has served as a Pulaski County election commissioner. Before that, she worked as the county’s director of elections. (She’s also unsuccessfully run for secretary of state as a Democrat, twice.)
Without more clarity on the electronic signature issue, there’s going to be a lot of confusion, she said. “Counties don’t know what to do.”
Inman suspects a judge will need to weigh in. “It needs clarification, it really does. And it should have happened way before now,” she said. “Nobody has questioned it before.”
In the meantime, Elliott said, she’s going to keep on doing what she’s doing.
“The use of electronic signatures is neither a novelty nor a gimmick. It is the norm on driver’s licenses, voter registration applications signed at the DMV, forms for overseas absentee voting, tax returns, mortgage documents, loan applications, and more. This isn’t just an attack on electronic signatures; it’s an affront to our people and a direct assault on our democracy,” Elliott said in a press release sent out Thursday. “The time to act is now. We are calling on Secretary of State John Thurston to come out of the dark ages and support secure, convenient access to the ballot.”
Hollingsworth, the Pulaski County clerk, said the episode shows the need for legislation to allow Arkansans to register online, like residents of most other states.
“In 2024, we can apply for a mortgage, student loan or purchase a car online using an electronic signature,” she said. “We should be able to register to vote and even update our voter records online.”
