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Arkansas lawmakers refer hand-count ballot petitioners to ethics committee

Saline County Clerk Doug Curtis realized that 18 of the canvassers listed their address as the same hotel.
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Saline County Clerk Doug Curtis realized that 18 of the canvassers listed their address as the same hotel.

A failed petition to ban voting machines in Saline County has been referred to the Ethics Commission and The Attorney General's Office of Election Integrity. after issues were found with the way signatures for the petition were collected. Members of the Arkansas Legislature made the decision Monday at a Joint Performance Review Committee Meeting.

To put a local ordinance on the ballot in Saline County, in this election cycle, you need 5,590 validated signatures. A group called Restore Election Integrity Arkansas says they collected thousands of signatures from locals to put their measure on the ballot.

The ballot measure would have mandated votes in the county be made without a machine and counted by hand. Restore Election Integrity Arkansas is led in part by Col. Conrad Reynolds, who told Little Rock Public Radio before that he does not trust voting machines.

Reynolds has said voting machines could be flipping votes to select more moderate Republicans over more conservative candidates. Little Rock Public Radio has not been able to verify these claims, and critics of hand counting say its expensive, costly and prone to error.

Rep. David Ray, R-Maumelle, said the committee would not use Monday’s meeting to discuss the merits of paper ballots.

“This is a meeting about the potential abuse of our petition system,” he said.

The legislators brought up a Facebook post by a man named Joshua James, whose profile says he lives in New Mexico. James posted on Facebook in July “The Arkansas PAPER BALLOT initiative is in need of 15-20 full time signature gatherers for 2 weeks.”

After listing phone numbers and work hours, the post says, “the payment is listed as “$1200/week for non Arkansas residents and $1000/week for Arkansas residents." It clarifies that flights, gas and hotels will also be reimbursed. The post was complete with a picture of an orange van asking people to sign for paper ballots.

It's not illegal in Arkansas to pay canvassers, but the implication that the canvassers were from out of state worried members of the legislature.

When it came time to approve the signatures for the hand counting petition, Saline County Clerk Doug Curtis noticed that 18 of the canvassers listed their residence to be the same address: 820 Bill Dean Drive in Conway, the address of a Home2 Suites by Hilton hotel.

Hotel Manager Cameron Wiley testified Monday that the canvassers' hotel rooms were all paid in “one giant check for $13,000.” They checked in in June and July and checked out in August. He said Reynolds paid for the rooms.

Curtis threw out the signatures because they did not list a Saline County residence as their home address. This meant the measure could not go on the ballot. Restore Election Integrity sued, but in September, the lawsuit was thrown out by a local court.

The legislative committee Monday also alleged that canvassers or representatives from the group may have been altering documents. Under each signature page the canvassers collected, the address was blacked out and replaced with the same Conway hotel address. Two notaries testified that they did not see the alterations to the documents when they notarized them. Curtis had testified before the committee in the past that he did not alter the documents.

Sen. Jonathan Dismang, R-Beebe, called the situation ironic since the argument for paper ballots is that they are more secure.

“The same group that wants paper ballots is okay with altering notarized documents before submission.”

Attorney for the elections group, Clint Lancaster, said he could not confirm if the group altered the documents. But, he said he would not have a problem with it if someone in the group did.

He said he could not answer lawmakers’ questions as to who altered the documents because of attorney-client privilege. He also admitted that he had just retained Restore Election Integrity Arkansas as a client in the past week, meaning they were not his client when the documents would have been altered.

Dismang asked Lancaster to tell the committee who altered the documents. After a heated back-and-forth, Lancaster would not say.

Lancasater brought with him Mike Gableman, an attorney he was also working with. Gableman, a former justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, on several occasions began to raise his voice at legislators. He gave several long speeches about election integrity and the weaponization of government. Gableman was admonished by the legislature for his conduct throughout the meeting.

At the end of the meeting, the matter was referred to an ethics committee. Rep. David Ray implied that the legislature may make changes to canvassing laws in the coming legislative session to address the issues the committee identified in the meeting.

This year, Restore Election Integrity Arkansas worked to collect signatures for nine petitions to mandate hand counting across the state. All nine were thrown out by clerks. These decisions triggered nine lawsuits. The measures in Cleburne and Independence County will be on the ballot. The suits in Johnson and White County are ongoing while five others were dismissed.

Josie Lenora is the Politics/Government Reporter for Little Rock Public Radio.