Getting involved in the election process should happen long before Election Day, Arkansas Secretary of State John Thurston told Hot Springs National Park Rotary Club during its meeting Wednesday at National Park College.
While most people only think about elections in the weeks leading up to a primary or general election, the head of the state's election division said that is "too late to complain about who's on the ballot."
"We need to push good candidates, recruit good candidates," he said. "We want to encourage people to run for office. ... If you have three knuckleheads running from that particular position, guess what? You only get to choose between three knuckleheads, right? So it's too late."
Thurston said, in his opinion, elections are made up of three parts -- the people who run them, the laws that govern them and the machines that tabulate them.
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"I do want to talk about the election equipment, but first I want to encourage you," he said. "Because of some of the laws that we have here in Arkansas ... the Heritage Foundation, if you're familiar with that particular group, they rank Arkansas sixth in the nation for election integrity, based upon the laws we have here in Arkansas. So I want to encourage you with that first."
While Arkansas does use electronic machines for voting, Thurston said they are just tabulators.
"A lot of people say, 'I wish we could go to paper ballot,'" he said. "We have a paper ballot. The only difference between that voting booth that you walk up to -- only difference between that and a pencil is the machine is simply a ballot marker. That's all it's doing. It's marking the ballot for you. Prints it out. You get to look at it, right, before it goes to the tabulator. Then you put it in the machine and it's tabulated."
Counties are required to keep the paper ballots for two years after each election, and the secretary of state's office does a random audit of election results each year to check accuracy.
"We randomly pick different counties and different precincts, and they go in and like hand count those ballots to reconcile those results to the tabulator," Thurston said.
"And in the last audit that we had, I believe we counted 40-something-thousand ballots, hand-counted. There was one ballot that wasn't counted, and we believe it was due to human error, the way it might have been put into the machine," he said. "We're not sure. However, there was one ballot out of 40-something-thousand."
Thurston said each county has three election commissioners, and they can choose to count the votes by hand to verify the machines' totals. He encourages that, he said, and commissioners have 10 days following a primary and 15 days following a general election to certify the results.
"I would support lengthening those days for the primaries to give them more time, and the reason is we are supporting and we're pushing that if the county wants to hand-count those ballots, they can," he said.
"There's no law prohibiting a county from taking those ballots after it's tabulated from the tabulator and hand counting. It's essentially an audit, right? We encourage counties to do that. Then you would have the best of both worlds."
Arkansas Secretary of State John Thurston addresses Hot Springs National Park Rotary Club Wednesday at National Park College. (The Sentinel-Record/Lance Brownfield)