The American Democracy Minute Radio Report & Podcast for March 30, 2023
Today’s Links
Articles & Resources:
FiveThirtyEight.com – Has Your State Made It Harder To Vote?
Heritage Foundation – Three Cases of Voter Fraud Since 2002
Arkansas Legislature – HB 1411 – Banning the “Pre-emptive” Sending of Absentee Ballots
Arkansas Legislature – HB 258 – Eliminating Drop Boxes
Arkansas Legislature – SB 250 – Limiting Ballot Counting to 24 hours, et. al.
Arkansas Legislature – HB 1715 (2021) Absentee Ballot Restrictions
Arkansas Times – Did Arkansas’s new voting restrictions affect turnout?
Groups Taking Action:
ACLU of Arkansas, League of Women Voters Arkansas, Get Loud Arkansas, ForARPeople, Arkansas United, Indivisible Little Rock & Central Arkansas
Today’s Script: (Variations occur with audio due to editing for time)
You’re listening to the American Democracy Minute, keeping YOUR government by and for the people.
If you live in Arkansas, three bills just signed by the Governor just made voting more complicated for the state’s vulnerable citizens who use absentee ballots – and the election workers who count those ballots.
Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed HB 1411 this week, prohibiting the “proactive” sending of absentee ballots by election officials, criminalizing it as a misdemeanor. Some pro-voter states allow permanent vote-by-mail lists, aiding disabled and elderly voters.
If you receive your absentee ballot, you’ll no longer have access to drop boxes to return it. Where some states restricted them only to secure locations, Arkansas has banned them altogether with SB 258, joining South Dakota’s similar ban, signed this month.
It’s true that processing mail-in ballots take longer than in-person ballots, which is why since the height of the pandemic, many states allowed mail ballots to be preprocessed before election day. Arkansas? SB 250 mandates that the count be completed, QUOTE, “within twenty-four hours of the close of the polls, and with no significant breaks in the counting process.”
This is on top of 2021’s HB 1715, which added extra absentee verification requirements and made the returning of four or more absentee ballots an act of voter fraud.
The conservative Heritage Foundation counts only three cases of voter fraud since 2002.
We have links to Arkansas’ new laws, and the groups taking action at AmericanDemocracyMinute.org. I’m Brian Beihl.
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