ST. LOUIS (CN) — A three-judge panel of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals pushed back hard on the counsel for a voter registration nonprofit during Thursday’s oral arguments in the dispute over Arkansas’s policy prohibiting electronic signatures on voter registration applications.
Get Loud Arkansas, a voter registration nonprofit in the state, used electronic signatures on the voter registration applications they submitted in 2024. When it first asked to do this, Get Loud argued, Arkansas’s secretary of state and attorney general both told them that there would be no issue with using these electronic signatures, as opposed to physical signatures or “wet signatures” mailed in by the voters. But in late February 2024, the state election board abruptly enacted a “wet signature rule” requiring those physical signatures.
Get Loud won a preliminary injunction from the district court in September 2024 that blocked Arkansas from enforcing its wet signature rule. U.S. District Judge Timothy L. Brooks, a Barack Obama appointee, found that Arkansas officials failed to show how a physical signature versus a digital signature materially affects a voter’s qualification to vote in the state of Arkansas…