Voters walk into cast their ballots at the Center Point Church on Nov. 8, 2022 in Orem, Utah. (George Frey/Getty Images)
Voter participation in Arkansas is, in a word, abysmal. According to a U.S. Election Assistance Commission report , we were dead last in voter registration (63% of eligible residents) and voter turnout (54%) in the 2020 election, which means about a third of adult Arkansans made decisions for everyone else.
So if I told you that a grassroots group had come up with an innovative way to tackle this problem by making voter registration easier and more efficient, you might think that the people charged with running our election machinery — Secretary of State John Thurston and the Arkansas State Board of Election Commissioners — would do everything they could to support it.
You would be wrong. Instead, they’ve done a good deal to impede it — in the process, disregarding the attorney general, incurring $250,000 in legal costs, and being rebuked by a federal judge , who said they likely violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964.