We reported last night on a lawsuit prepared for the League of Women Voters of Arkansas and Arkansas United to challenge new Arkansas election laws modeled on the national Republican agenda to make it harder to vote.

The League of Women Voters has issued a statement on the lawsuit.

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The Arkansas General Assembly voted to pass sweeping legislation that is clearly
intended to and will have the effect of making it harder for eligible Arkansas voters to
participate in the state’s elections. Particularly hard hit by these new and entirely
unjustifiable restrictions will be Arkansas’ Black voters.

Arkansas ranks among the lowest-turnout jurisdictions in the country. In particular,
Arkansas’ Black voter turnout rates are already far depressed below both white voter
turnout in Arkansas, and Black voter turnout in virtually every other state. The General
Assembly should be working to increase turnout instead of making it harder for voters to have their voices heard in the state’s elections.

These restrictive voting bills were passed despite the fact that Secretary Thurston
declared in March: “Despite the global pandemic, we had one of the most successful
elections in state history.”

“There was absolutely no evidence that the 2020 election in Arkansas was anything but safe, secure, and successful,” said Arkansas League President Bonnie Miller. “The new restrictive bills will not increase the public’s confidence in the state’s election
administration or ensure election integrity— they will do the opposite. These bills were a solution in search of a problem that doesn’t exist, and will disproportionately
disenfranchise voters of color.”

The suit filed in the Circuit Court of Pulaski County alleges that the new laws will:
○ Require elections officials to engage in the arbitrary and error-prone process of
matching a voter’s signature on their absentee ballot application to the voter’s
signature on their original voter registration application. In fact, legislators who
pushed restrictive voting election this cycle admitted that signature-matching is
not reliable; it simply imposes additional, unneeded hurdles to the voting process,
and is ineffective at protecting the integrity of the state’s elections
○ Unjustifiably move up the deadline for in-person drop off of absentee ballots to
the Friday before election day. To show how nonsensical this restriction is, the
state will accept ballots that arrive in the mail by election day—meaning that
voters who receive or cast their absentee ballots closer to election day are forced
to simply hope that USPS delivers their ballot in time. Prohibiting in-person
delivery of the ballot during the final days of the election does not make elections
more secure, it only makes it harder for voters to have their ballots counted;
○ Get rid of the sworn statement option for provisional voters without required
identification to have their votes counted, meaning voters who have qualifying
identification must now return to the county clerk’s office with an identification by
the Monday after election day (and voters who do not will be disenfranchised
completely); and
○ Prohibit anyone except voters from entering or remaining within 100 feet of a
polling place, even to support or accompany voters, and prohibits the distribution
of food and water to voters waiting in long lines to encourage or enable them to
stay in line and have their votes counted.

The lawsuit has been filed in Pulaski Circuit Court, according to news releases, but it doesn’t currently appear on the state courts website.

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