Get Loud Arkansas, the voter registration group headed by former state Sen. Joyce Elliott, filed a civil rights lawsuit Wednesday evening against state and local elections officials over Arkansas’s recent 180-degree turn against registration forms signed electronically.
Get Loud was joined in the lawsuit by Vote.org, a national group that also registers voters, and two individual plaintiffs who had their e-signed voter registration forms rejected by county clerks in Washington and Pope counties. Filed in federal court in Fayetteville, the complaint names members of the State Board of Election Commissioners and three county clerks as defendants.
Arkansas is one of just a handful of states that doesn’t allow online voter registration, which likely contributes to its dismally low rates of registered voters and election turnout. Arkansans can fill out an electronic form at a state revenue office — our equivalent of the DMV — but otherwise have to do it the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper.
In January, Get Loud began providing an alternative: Voters could fill out the official Arkansas voter registration form on the Get Loud website and sign it electronically, just as people do these days on everything from retail purchases to mortgage documents. Get Loud would then print off the signed form and deliver it to the appropriate election official — typically a local county clerk’s office.
According to the complaint, Get Loud checked repeatedly with Secretary of State John Thurston’s office in early February about whether the e-signed forms would pose a problem. They said no. “[T]he Secretary of State does not see how a digital signature should be treated any differently than a wet signature,” a staffer in the office told Get Loud on Feb. 14, using the term for a signature made with a pen.
All that changed, the complaint says, after the Arkansas Times wrote a positive article in late February about Get Loud’s efforts. We reported at the time that 358 people had registered to vote using the online tool in the early months of 2024 and that 78% of the new registrants were under age 20.
Two days later, Thurston himself sent a letter to county clerks urging them to reject voter registration forms that had been signed electronically. (In Arkansas, county clerks are locally elected officials that operate separately from state government, but they often look to the secretary of state for guidance on voter registration questions.)
“The Secretary’s brief, two-paragraph letter provided no explanation or legal basis for his sudden shift in position,” the lawsuit says. “Moreover, the Secretary issued this letter without any warning to GLA [Get Loud Arkansas], despite the aforementioned correspondence with the Secretary’s office about this precise issue.”
In the months since then, an emergency rule from by the State Board of Election Commissioners has made it official: Only “wet” signatures should count on Arkansas voter registration forms, unless they are filled out in certain state government offices. That’s despite an opinion from Attorney General Tim Griffin‘s office in April, requested by Thurston, that says exactly the opposite.
According to the complaint, Thurston’s office won’t even communicate with Get Loud about whether Arkansans who previously e-signed a form might have their voter registrations rendered invalid.
“Despite repeated attempts to seek guidance and clarity from the Secretary of State’s office on this specific issue, GLA has not received any response to its inquiries,” the complaint says. “Consequently, hundreds of voters appear at risk of having their registrations retroactively canceled.”
Chris Powell, a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office, declined to comment. “We are reviewing the complaint and have no comment at this time,” he said Thursday.
Get Loud says many users of the online tool have already had their e-signed applications rejected, including the two individual plaintiffs named in the lawsuit — Nikki Pastor of Washington County and Blake Loper of Pope County. They’re not alone, the complaint says.
“GLA staff and volunteers visited Camden Fairview High School in Camden, Arkansas in February 2024 — before the announcement of the [State Board of Election Commissioners’] emergency rule — to help register high school students,” the lawsuit states. “GLA collected dozens of voter registration applications through its online tool and delivered them to the county clerk. However, GLA was soon notified that none of the applications would be accepted because they were signed with electronic signatures.”
The lawsuit seeks relief under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, drawing a direct link between the state’s recent actions and practices in the segregation-era South. At the time, county clerks often denied Black voters the ability to register based on “hyper-technical or entirely invented errors” while ignoring errors on the forms of white applicants, the complaint says. It continues:
Yet more than half a century later, the legacy of past discrimination endures. Arkansas has the lowest voter registration rate in the country at only 62 percent, with young and minority voters registered at even lower rates. And its election officials continue to reject new applications, including from Plaintiffs Nikki Pastor and Blake Loper, simply because they signed their applications with the “wrong” instrument — a meaningless technicality that creates unlawful barriers to the franchise and obstructs the efforts of civic organizations like Plaintiffs GLA and Vote.org that use innovative technology to promote civic engagement.
In addition to the State Board of Election Commissioners, the lawsuit names the county clerks of Pulaski, Washington and Benton counties as defendants. (The Pope County clerk is not a defendant.) Thurston is named as a defendant in his capacity as chair of the state board, rather than as secretary of state.