Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night will stop the mail, they say. What happens after it arrives is another story.
Arkansas rejected about 1,100 out of the 15,000 mail-in ballots it received in the 2022 general election, according to an Arkansas Times analysis of recently published federal data — a rate of 7%, more than four times the national average and much higher than any of its neighbors that reported data. Only one other state, Delaware, rejected a higher percentage in 2022.
And Arkansas is a repeat offender. In 2020, as election officials everywhere grappled with a surge of absentee ballots due to the pandemic, the state had one of the highest rejection rates in the country, tossing around 5% of the roughly 118,000 mail-in ballots it received. In 2018, its rejection rate was between 8% and 9%, second only to New York’s.
Those figures come from the Election Administration and Voting Survey, conducted every two years by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. The self-reported data is flawed: Some counties leave responses blank, turn in questionable numbers or don’t respond at all. The 2020 survey appears especially prone to errors, perhaps due to the unprecedented surge in mail-in voting that year. (The Arkansas Times directly contacted three counties that had large data discrepancies in 2020 — Pulaski, Sebastian and Crawford — to calculate a more accurate statewide rejection rate than the percentage officially reported in the 2020 survey results, 6.4%.)
While incomplete, the data gives the best snapshot available of how election operations compare across the country. It indicates Arkansas chucks out more of its absentee ballots than most other states, disenfranchising members of the military, students away at school, people unable to reach the polls for medical reasons and many others.
What is going on here? One tempting answer is that red-state policies, championed by Republicans in the name of combating election fraud, have made it harder for people to vote. That appears to have been true in 2022, when around half of all rejected mail-in ballots in Arkansas were turned away due to a lack of photo ID — presumably the result of a state law passed in 2021 that tightened ID requirements.
But Arkansas’s rejection rate was high in previous years as well. What’s more, there’s no obvious partisan or regional pattern. Some of the states that tossed out the most mail-in ballots in recent years are solid blue, while all of the state’s Republican-controlled neighbors tended to have lower rates than Arkansas.
Arkansas elections officials seem to have little interest in the question of why the state is an outlier. The Arkansas secretary of state’s office, the agency that maintains voter registration records and ensures compliance with federal election laws, told the Arkansas Times that responsibility for ballot acceptance or rejection rests with county-level officials.
“Any speculation as to why certain decisions were made or why certain percentages are what they are would be just that, speculation,” spokesman Chris Powell said in response to questions about the EAVS data. “As far as comparing Arkansas’s rates with those of other states, each state has separate election laws, procedures and standards as well, which can make it hard to compare or explain directly.” The office did not respond to a request for an interview with the secretary of state, Republican John Thurston.
The body responsible for training and monitoring county election officials and poll workers, the state Board of Election Commissioners, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Presumed guilty
Susan Inman, who served on the Pulaski County Election Commision until resigning in April 2022 for health reasons, has some answers where the state has none. Inman speaks from years of experience: She’s served as elections chief in the secretary of state’s office, worked as an election coordinator for the state board and made two runs for secretary of state in 2014 and 2018. A Democrat, she lost soundly both times.
Arkansas’s problems start with the complexity of its “voter statement,” Inman said. This is a document that every absentee voter must fill out and return along with his or her ballot. Poll workers compare the name, address, date of birth and signature on the voter statement with the corresponding information on an application the voter filled out to request an absentee ballot.
“The voter statement, if you’ve ever looked at one, it’s almost like a test,” Inman said. “If you don’t put the right information in the right spot, it’s a rejection. There’s no wiggle room. For instance, if the date of birth is missing, it’s an absolute, flat-out rejection. If the voter doesn’t sign it, it’s a flat-out rejection.”
A growing number of states, recognizing the possibility of human error in filling out paperwork, have a “cure period” to address such issues: If an absentee voter leaves off a signature, for instance, he or she is contacted and has a chance to correct the problem before the ballot is thrown out. Not in Arkansas. A mail-in voter who mistakenly leaves required information off the voter statement typically will have his or her ballot summarily tossed out by a poll worker.
Then there are gray areas: shaky signatures, nicknames instead of full names, missing ZIP codes. If rank-and-file poll workers aren’t sure how to handle a questionable submission, they pass it on to the county board of election commissioners, a three-person council tasked with sorting the wheat from the chaff on election night. Commissioners and poll workers cannot see the voter’s actual ballot when making such decisions; it is sealed in a separate, inner envelope that’s not opened until later.
State law says the information on the voter statement must “compare” with the information on the voter’s application, not necessarily match precisely, Inman said. But many poll workers and election commissioners are suspicious of anything less than an exact match.
Every local election board in Arkansas is composed of two Republicans and one Democrat. Under state law, the party holding a majority of statewide constitutional offices (governor, attorney general and so on) gets to pick two commissioners, while the minority party picks one. Inman said she sometimes clashed with her Republican colleagues over the validity of signatures on mail-in ballots.
“I’d say, ‘I think it’s close enough — it’s an older person.’ And they’d say, ‘No, we’re rejecting it.’ I’d object, but it didn’t matter. I’m only one of three, and the majority rules in that situation,” she said.
Josh Price, the Democratic appointee to the Pulaski County Election Commission during the mad scramble of the 2020 election, said his Republican colleagues tended to assume any issue with a mail-in ballot was due to fraud, rather than simple human error. “I think that’s a mentality issue here in our state,” he said. “The ballot is supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around.”
The state gives no specific guidelines on issues such as nicknames, and that’s a problem, Price said. “Everyone knows ‘Josh’ is ‘Joshua,’ or ‘Ben’ is ‘Benjamin,’ but if you have a unique name or a foreign name and you write your nickname, people may not know it,” he said. “My mother’s name is Terecita — she’s from the Philippines — and her nickname is Tess. If she signs ‘Tess Price,’ do we know the poll worker will equate that with ‘Terecita’?”
What about an address with a missing apartment number? Many mail-in ballots come from older voters at assisted living facilities or retirement homes — must their room number be included on the address for it to count? If a voter puts down the right street address but the wrong ZIP code, is the ballot invalid? Such choices are left up to commissioners.
To Price’s frustration, he was often overruled. “We had an 82-year-old woman who had had a massive stroke turn in a mail-in ballot and a letter from her doctor explaining her condition and a letter from her husband explaining her condition, and both letters were notarized,” he said. “Everything matched — she had the ID, had everything — and the signature was super shaky. … My two colleagues outvoted me and threw out her ballot.
“I was like, ‘Just for the record, that’s disgusting.’ OK? This is someone’s grandma. She’s done everything she can, she’s gone out of her way to get documentation. And they’re like, ‘Well, we just can’t accept it.’”
One of the Republican commissioners who served alongside Price in 2020, Evelyn Gomez, declined to comment. The other, Kristi Stahr, could not be reached by press time. Both have since left the commission.
Price made an unsuccessful bid for Arkansas secretary of state in 2022, partly out of a desire to address voting rights issues like these. He now works with Arkansas United, a group that advocates for the rights and interests of immigrants in the state.
The federal survey also asks local officials to explain why they threw out mail-in ballots, and in 2020 the top reason given in Arkansas was an issue with the voter statement. In 2018, the top reason for rejection was ballots arriving after the state’s deadline of 7:30 p.m. on election night. That cutoff time isn’t unusual among states, but it’s not exactly generous either: Laws in about 20 states allow the counting of ballots that arrive a few days late, as long as they were postmarked on or before Election Day.
The top reason mail-in ballots were rejected in 2022, however, was a lack of ID — until recently, absentee voters could submit a signed statement in lieu of making a photocopy of their ID, but a new law passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature in 2021 has removed that option.
The voter ID law does at least include a cure period, which means absentee voters who didn’t include a copy of their ID along with their ballot have until the Monday after Election Day to bring it to their county clerk. The state badly needs a similar grace period to correct problems with the voter statement form, according to the League of Women Voters of Arkansas and other plaintiffs who sued the state in federal court in 2020. The lawsuit is now awaiting a ruling by U.S. District Judge P.K. Holmes.
UOCAVA voters
Ibby Caputo is a journalist previously living in Arkansas who now resides in the United Kingdom. (Caputo has previously freelanced for the Arkansas Times.) She’s one of thousands of American expats who exercise their right to vote in U.S. elections under a federal law called the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, or UOCAVA, which also covers U.S. military servicemembers and their families.
UOCAVA voters — elections specialists pronounced the acronym as YOU-uh-KAH-vuh — appear to have an especially hard time voting in Arkansas, according to the federal election data. In 2022, Arkansas rejected 8% of the UOCAVA ballots it received, the fifth highest in the country. The UOCAVA rejection rate for 2020 was an alarming 18%, but the data for that year contain so many errors that it’s difficult to know the true numbers.
Caputo’s experience in 2020 illustrates the roadblocks facing UOCAVA voters. What should have been a routine process ended up requiring days of back-and-forth communication with county and state elections officials, she said.
Before moving to the U.K. in early 2020, Caputo lived in Newton County, where she and her husband remain registered today. Federal law generally requires expat voters to remain registered in the last state and jurisdiction where they lived before moving abroad. Her mother-in-law and father-in-law have also moved to the U.K. and are registered in Carroll County.
Caputo was determined to vote in the 2020 election and mailed an absentee ballot application to the Newton County clerk that September. When she discovered her application was held up in the mail, she contacted the clerk’s office for advice. A worker at the clerk’s office emailed Caputo an electronic copy of her ballot (improperly, since the office had not yet received her application) and instructed her to “just send it back to us.”
Caputo asked for further instructions — would she need a special envelope? Would she need to fill out other documents? The clerk’s office replied, “Are you wanting to mail it back or send it via email?”
This set off alarm bells for Caputo, who wondered how it could possibly be acceptable to simply email back her completed ballot with no additional security. She soon found a “Voting 101” document on the Arkansas secretary of state’s website telling voters that they “may NOT fax or email a ballot.”
Caputo then spoke to her father-in-law and realized the instructions she received from Newton County were very different than the ones he’d gotten from the clerk in neighboring Carroll County: To make sure his vote was counted, he’d need to include a voter statement, make a copy of his government-issued photo ID and print off two special envelopes — an inner one to preserve the secrecy of his ballot and an outer one to contain all the materials.
Caputo reached out to the Newton County clerk’s office again with this information. In the phone call that followed, Caputo said, the clerk shrugged off her concerns, telling her that it was up to the county election commissioners to decide what ballot counts and what doesn’t.
“I was horrified,” Caputo said. “What about civic pride and caring about voting? For me, it means something to me to have my voice heard … It seems like that’s not a value everybody has, but we should hope that in our county clerk’s office, at least, they care about that.
“You’ve got to wonder how much of that is language in national politics and the rhetoric around mail-in voting that was coming out of the president’s mouth [in 2020],” she said.
Eventually, Caputo contacted a friend in Little Rock, who put her in touch with an Arkansas elections expert — Susan Inman, as it turns out. Inman connected Caputo with an official at the secretary of state’s elections division who finally sent her the forms and instructions she needed. On Oct. 3, she mailed off her ballot and other materials to Newton County, but she’s still not sure if her vote that year was counted.
The Newton County clerk’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Voting issues for expats and military personnel are not unique to Arkansas. The Secure Families Initiative, a group representing servicemembers and their families, said military voters nationwide were 27% less likely to have voted in 2020 than civilians, in large part because of obstacles like international mail delays and complex residency questions. Arkansas’s tendency to reject UOCAVA ballots was “troubling,” Kate Marsh Lord, a spokeswoman for the group, told the Arkansas Times.
“Military members and their families make countless sacrifices to serve our nation — unnecessarily risking their vote should not be one of them,” she said.
Price, the former Pulaski County election commissioner, said he saw a disproportionate number of UOCAVA ballots get thrown out in the 2020 elections. In his opinion, poll workers are often confused about how to handle these ballots, which are relatively rare. (The whole state received about 2,500 UOCAVA ballots in 2020 and only about 500 in the 2022 midterms.)
“A lot of times, when the ballots come in, they’re in pretty rough shape, because they’re coming in from God knows where,” Price said. The forms used by military UOCAVA voters vary depending on the branch of service, he said, and are often poorly designed, making it hard to open them without ripping the contents. And they often include federal IDs that poll workers might not recognize as legitimate.
Caputo said she wasn’t surprised to hear Arkansas’s mail-in ballot rejection rate is among the worst in the country. After the problems she experienced with Newton County, she’d like to change her and her husband’s voter registrations to a different location, but she’s been told that’s not possible under the rules governing UOCAVA voters. They’d need to move back to a different place in Arkansas, or another state, then re-register there.
“Arkansas isn’t making it easy,” she said. “But I am determined to vote, so I will spend the time figuring out what needs to be done.”