Arkansas Supreme Court upholds use of state's electronic voting machines

The Arkansas Supreme Court ruled on Thursday the voting machines currently used in Arkansas comply with state law, contrary to arguments by a group that sued the state to halt their use.

Thursday's ruling upheld a Pulaski County circuit court’s decision from last year. That decision dismissed a lawsuit which argued that Arkansas' voting equipment doesn’t give voters a sufficient chance to review and change their selections, as required by statute.

Arkansas code mandates that voting machines must “permit the voter to verify in a private and independent manner the votes selected by the voter on the ballot before the ballot is cast.”

The electronic voting machines in question print the voter’s selections onto a paper ballot, which shows the selections in writing and in the form of a barcode.

The plaintiffs wrote in their original complaint from December 2022 that, since the scanning machines only read the barcode and not the text, they deprive voters of the ability to review and change the selections on their ballot before submitting it.

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They also wrote that, because of this, it was illegal to use public funds to pay for the machines and that the company that manufactures them "committed fraud by representing and warrantying that its machines complied with state and federal law."

They said the court should ban the use of these type of voting machines immediately and permanently throughout the state.

Writing for the majority, Associate Justice Courtney Rae Hudson "affirm[ed] the circuit court’s dismissal of appellants’ amended complaint."

The plaintiff in the original suit, Arkansas Voter Integrity Initiative, Inc., is a nonpartisan nonprofit “dedicated to restoring election integrity in Arkansas.” In its appeal to the state Supreme Court, it was joined by its CEO, Conrad Reynolds, as a co-appellant.

The defendants included Secretary of State John Thurston and the State Board of Election Commissioners, as well as the manufacturer of the voting machines, the Nebraska-based Election Systems and Software, LLC.

Hudson cited testimony from Daniel Shults, the director of the State Board of Election Commissioners.

After a voter inputs their decisions, the screen of the voting machine “displays all of the voter’s selections. Shults testified that the voter is able to go back and make changes to those selections if desired.”

Responding to Arkansas Voter Integrity Initiative’s allegations that the barcodes on the ballots were not reliable or verifiable, Shults said that “it was possible to confirm the accuracy of the bar codes but that the average voter will read the selections written in English.”

In addition to being certified by the Board of Election Commissioners, he said, machines must also be certified by the Federal Election Assistance Commission.

Hudson wrote that the circuit court had found that “there was no evidence that the bar codes on any Arkansas voter’s ballot did not correspond with the voter’s selections reflected in the readable text; and that there was no evidence that the bar codes on any Arkansas voter’s ballot had been altered or were inaccurate.”

The Arkansas Voter Integrity Initiative did not respond to requests for comment on Friday. In one of the most recent postings on the organization’s website, from last summer, Reynolds wrote that the organization was continuing in its mission “to shed light on the perils of using electronic voting systems.”

Reynolds is also the COO of a ballot question committee called Restore Election Integrity Arkansas, which was behind a proposed constitutional amendment seeking to require hand-marked paper ballots and hand counts for Arkansas elections.

Proposed language for the amendment was rejected twice by Attorney General Tim Griffin for technical reasons. The committee appears to no longer be active.

“This is a win for the voters and taxpayers of Arkansas,” said Griffin in a statement released Thursday. “The State Supreme Court affirms what we’ve already known to be true: The voting process and machines used in Arkansas comply with state law.”

A representative from the Board of Election Commissioners declined to comment on Friday. A representative for the Secretary of State couldn’t be reached for comment.

Justice Shawn A. Womack concurred in the decision without an opinion while Justice Barbara Womack Webb dissented.