Arkansas County Makes Big Move to Ditch Voting Machines for Paper Ballots
A county in Arkansas is moving to help citizens trust their elections by eliminating electronic voting machines and going back to paper balloting.
The Searcy County Quorum Court, the county’s governing body, approved a resolution 6-2 on Monday that will return paper ballots, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
The process is not quite complete, though. Under state law, counties have the option to go either way, whether paper or electronic balloting, and a new ordinance needs to be passed to finalize the changeover. Still, the new system is all but approved.
Under the state’s Act 350, which was enacted this year, the costs of paper balloting for elections must be paid for by county officials, not the state.
Wayne Witcher, a member of the Searcy County Quorum Court, told the Democrat-Gazette that a bipartisan committee made the recommendation to go to paper balloting. Witcher, who voted to make the switch, also said the plan would not be too expensive to implement.
“Had it been overly burdensome, then I would have voted no,” Witcher added.
The Arkansas Voter Integrity Initiative, a paper-ballot-voting advocacy group, was one of the groups the county consulted as it weighed its options to return integrity to elections.
“There were a lot of citizens there who took the ball and ran with it and did their own research, apparently,” Conrad Reynold, the advocacy group’s CEOl, told the Democrat-Gazette. “They carried the ball pretty much themselves and [were] able to get that done, and I’m very proud of them for doing that.”
Reynolds’ group has also sued the state over its use of bar-code voting machines and has asked the courts to issue an order restraining their use.
Searcy, in north-central Arkansas, isn’t the first county in the Razorback State to consider a move toward paper ballots. In January, Cleburne County, also in the north-central part of the state, moved to put an end to electronic voting.
However, in March county officials reversed course and decided to keep the electronic machines, according to the Democrat-Gazette.
More than half of the states have been studying voting practices looking into dumping voting machines and going back to paper ballots.
In Georgia, for instance, 13 experts organized to send a letter to the State Election Board and to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, calling for the immediate end of the use of Dominion Voting Systems touchscreen voting machines, The Associated Press reported last year.
Former President Donald Trump also backed an Arizona lawsuit looking to force state officials to go back to paper balloting.
At a rally in April of 2022, Trump told supporters that, “Every state should follow the lead of the patriots in Arizona where yesterday Kari Lake and Mark Finchem filed a lawsuit to ban electronic voting machines and replace them with a transparent hand count.”
President Trump: “Every state should follow the lead of the Patriots in Arizona where yesterday @KariLake & @RealMarkFinchem filed a lawsuit to ban electronic voting machines & replace them with a transparent hand count” pic.twitter.com/9rNt8oSAsp
— Mark Finchem for AZ Senate (@RealMarkFinchem) April 25, 2022
More recently, as the 2024 presidential election looms, nine states have veered away from the Electronic Registration Information Center, an interstate system of cross-checking voter registration intended to avoid duplication.
Instead of continuing to dabble with electronic voting systems that are hooked up to the internet and vulnerable to tampering, the states need to return integrity to our elections, bring back paper balloting, and go back to voting on Election Day — not Election Month or Election Season.
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