A committee of state lawmakers will consider an emergency rule today that would help keep Arkansas mired in the last century.
The rule, proposed by the state Board of Election Commissioners last week, bars electronic signatures on voter registration applications unless the forms are filled out at certain government agencies. It instead requires “wet signatures,” meaning applications must have a pen-to-paper signature on them to be valid.
It’s on the agenda for the Arkansas Legislative Council’s executive committee, scheduled to meet after today’s House and Senate sessions.
The state Board of Election Commissioners is pushing this rule despite an opinion from the attorney general that says electronic signatures are fine, and after contradictory advice from the secretary of state’s office, the official keeper of voter data. The office indicated to the voter engagement group Get Loud Arkansas in February that electronic signatures are probably OK. Later that month, though, Secretary of State John Thurston pulled a switcheroo, sending out letters to county clerks across the state telling them to reject applications unless they included old-timey inked signatures.
The state elections board then took up the cause, drafting a new rule to clarify what is and isn’t allowed. There was no discussion at the state election commission’s last meeting when they passed this rule barring electronic signatures, so we don’t know why they opted to discard the attorney general’s opinion.
The rule was accompanied by a “declaratory order” from the board that suggests using a computer to fill out any of the boxes on the state’s voter registration form — not just the signature — would not be legal:
Filling out a PDF with your phone/computer before signing it is a computer process. The former Election Commissioner who requested the directed order that will void a bunch of registrations, used a computer process to complete his registration. #VoterSuppression #arpx #FOIA pic.twitter.com/h4rTyytzeT
— Jay Orsi (@JayOrsi) April 23, 2024
Chris Madison, staff director at the state elections board, has not returned calls seeking clarification and comment since the vote last week.
The measure is being offered as an emergency rule, which means no public comment is required right now. If approved, it will go into effect for 120 days. Public notice and public comment will be required eventually to make the rule permanent.
It’s unclear whether existing voter registrations that were filled in with the aid of a computer would be invalidated should this pass. If so, tens of thousands of Arkansas voters would need to re-up.
Vote.org, a national group that seeks to help people engage in democracy, reports they’ve helped roughly 90,000 Arkansans register to vote using a form that can be filled out online, printed, signed and mailed in. The group has criticized Arkansas’s proposed rule.
While it’s a quaint idea to require some Founding Fathers John Hancock cosplay for aspiring participants in democracy, such analog transactions are inconvenient, unnecessary and no longer the norm. Most states now allow e-signatures for voter registration.
But putting persnickety requirements on the voter registration process is a new horizon for conservative efforts to gatekeep democracy. In Texas, for example, a state law requiring wet signatures was challenged in court. A federal court rejected the law, but the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed.
A similar case is pending in Florida.
