Earlier this month, the Arkansas Department of Finance & Administration announced that tens of thousands of registered voters who had updated or changed their information while at a revenue office may not have had those updates made. Scott Hardin is the spokesperson for the department. He said the system sends a batch of all the updates made at the end of the workday from the revenue offices to the secretary of state’s office.
The following is an edited transcript of a conversation between Hardin and Ozarks at Large's Matthew Moore.
Scott Hardin: The Secretary of State's office then forwards it out to the county clerks, and it's an automatic system. We don't have to do anything. The agents enter it, and it moves at the end of the day. To clarify, this is not new voter registration. We want to be clear with that. If you registered to vote at a revenue office, you are fine. This is about existing voters who change their addresses from roughly Jan. 1 through March. For some reason, when looking back at that automatic system, we could not confirm with 100% confidence that it had been transferred every night. It didn't show us that all of those records were transferring. So, we look back, and ultimately, the number of people we want to ensure those changes successfully took place is 49,000. So, we're sending 49,000 letters to Arkansans across the state who changed their address during that time. And what we're saying is, please just contact your county clerk — for the majority is probably fine, it's probably a non-issue — but again, out of an abundance of caution, contact your county clerk, make sure your address is correct. And again, just check to make sure it's there. Our hope is that only a very small number of those 49,000 are actually affected. But, knowing that it didn't successfully transfer during that time — or it may not have — we have to reach out to them and at least tell them to check it.
Matthew Moore: For folks who may be wondering, was it an area-specific thing? Was it just across the entire state? Do we see any sort of idea around where this might have specifically happened?
SH: Yeah, so it wasn't specific to any revenue offices or any areas. This was just simply the system itself. This was the system that transferred all of that data on a nightly basis from DFA to the Secretary of State's office. So, it was not specific to any office or area. And that's why, ultimately, we have 49,000 people that we're reaching out to. In a perfect world, we can look back and say this was successfully transferred and cross-check it. We have looked at this from every possible angle, and we decided the best way to address it is to contact each of those people individually. And as we're here on Aug. 22, we have issued those 49,000 letters. So, I think the question Arkansans probably have is, ‘Hey, I changed my address at some point. Am I affected?’ If there's any chance you were affected, you were going to receive a letter from DFA.
MM: What action has DFA taken to make sure that this won't happen again?
SH: So the reason it wasn't transferring was just a small change in the system was made. Again, it was just a slight adjustment that kind of threw the automatic transfer off to some degree. It changed the way it was transferred. So, thankfully, we found it. We addressed it. Everything's fine now. If you were there last month or if you're in there today changing something, it's fine, and we’re confident it's been addressed successfully. But again, looking back to January to March, we don't have that confidence. So that's why we're doing it. But yeah, we can say we've addressed it moving forward and everything's fine.
MM: And people should also take some comfort too that the last day to register to vote or update your registration to vote is Oct. 7 for the upcoming election. So even if you are questioning, even if it wasn't done at a DMV office and you want to take some time to verify that your registration is good to go, you still have time to do that, regardless of whether or not you were involved in this specific situation.
SH: Yeah, and we are very aware of that date. The deadline is going to be here sooner rather than later. And that's why it was really important that we get these letters out the door and contact Arkansans. Had we done this a month from now and pushed that deadline, I don't think that would have been fair to Arkansans. So that's why we got it out the door now: because of the approaching deadline for October. We're in a presidential election, and it's just a big year. So the last thing we want is someone walking in to vote and saying, my information's not correct. So that's why we did that.
MM: This may be a strange question, but do you have to have business at the revenue office to register to vote at a revenue office? Like, can someone just walk in and say, ‘hey, I want to register to vote?’
SH: Absolutely. That's certainly something you can do. You don't have to have a business there at the revenue office. You can go take a ticket and take care of it there. So yeah, that's a really good point. I'm glad you mentioned that. Yeah, you can use a revenue office as your resource.
MM: We might be smiling about that, but for folks who don't have access to a printer or people who don't have access to the physical copy, that may be the most reasonable way for them to register to vote, right?
SH: Yeah, that's true. So many times, people may not have those resources. And again, there are 134 revenue offices across the state. So, whether you're in a larger community or a small one, take advantage of it. And yeah, there are always people that make these assumptions. So yeah, take advantage of it.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. The authoritative record of KUAF programming is the audio record.
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