Trash the vote: Why Arkansas rejects more of its mail-in ballots than almost any other state

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night will stop the mail, they say. What happens after it arrives is another story.

Arkansas rejected about 1,100 out of the 15,000 mail-in ballots it received in the 2022 general election, according to an Arkansas Times analysis of recently published federal data — a rate of 7%, more than four times the national average and much higher than any of its neighbors that reported data. Only one other state, Delaware, rejected a higher percentage in 2022.

And Arkansas is a repeat offender. In 2020, as election officials everywhere grappled with a surge of absentee ballots due to the pandemic, the state had one of the highest rejection rates in the country, tossing around 5% of the roughly 118,000 mail-in ballots it received. In 2018, its rejection rate was between 8% and 9%, second only to New York’s.

Those figures come from the Election Administration and Voting Survey, conducted every two years by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. The self-reported data is flawed: Some counties leave responses blank, turn in questionable numbers or don’t respond at all. The 2020 survey appears especially prone to errors, perhaps due to the unprecedented surge in mail-in voting that year. (The Arkansas Times directly contacted three counties that had large data discrepancies in 2020 — Pulaski, Sebastian and Crawford — to calculate a more accurate statewide rejection rate than the percentage officially reported in the 2020 survey results, 6.4%.)

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https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2023/08/05/trash-the-vote-why-arkansas-rejects-more-of-its-mail-in-ballots-than-almost-any-other-state