Thousands of Arkansas voters flagged for removal

After sending faulty felony data to every county in Arkansas, the secretary of state’s office says it’s up to county clerks to fix the mistakes.

n July 5, Bo Ingram’s mailbox was overflowing after the holiday weekend, and he almost overlooked a letter from the Lonoke County clerk’s office telling him he’d been stripped of his right to vote. Ingram, 50, had his voting rights suspended after a felony conviction in 2000, but he was released from parole in 2005 and reinstated to the voter rolls a couple of years later. People convicted of felonies in Arkansas lose their right to vote, but may regain the right once they have been released from incarceration, completed all probation or parole and made good on any outstanding fines, court costs and restitution. It came as a rude surprise, then, for Ingram to be told almost a decade later that his rights were being rescinded again.

“I took off work Friday and went up there to the parole office in Lonoke” — a 30-minute drive from his home in Cabot — “and asked if I could get copies of my release papers,” he recalled. The parole office confirmed his papers were in order, and so he headed to the courthouse to find the county clerk, the local elected official responsible for registering voters. “I talked to a woman at the voter registration place, and she was more pissed off than I was about it,” Ingram said. “She said there’d already been several people in there with the same problem.”

Ingram said the woman reinstated him, apologized and explained that the Lonoke County clerk had recently received a list of voters flagged as felons from the office of Arkansas Secretary of State Mark Martin. The secretary of state is responsible for maintaining election records, and the office periodically sends criminal justice data to county clerks, which they use to strike felons from their rolls as required by law. But this particular batch of data, evidently transmitted in June, turned out to be severely flawed. It contained a large number of individuals, such as Ingram, who’d had their voting rights restored in the past — as well as about 4,000 other voters who’d never been convicted of a felony in the first place. (The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette first brought the story to statewide attention on July 25.)

Read more: http://www.arktimes.com/arkansas/thousands-of-arkansas-voters-flagged-for-removal/Content?oid=4518444