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Daniels proposes state-funded county election coordinators; Lagrone clarifies son's voting status Thursday, Sep 7, 2006 Betsy Turner and Doug Thompson Arkansas News Bureau LITTLE ROCK - Secretary of State Charlie Daniels on Wednesday proposed placing state-funded election coordinators in each of Arkansas 75 counties to help eliminate voting problems that plagued the May primaries. Offering few details, Daniels said his proposal would centralize and streamline the administration of elections at the local level and provide additional resources for both county clerks and county election commissions. "Election coordinators make sense for our counties," Daniels said in a release. "For too long, we have relied on a very antiquated and decentralized structure of election administration at the local level. It is time to change that, and to provide our part-time election officials with the help they desperately need." The proposal would require legislative authority to hire and fund 75 county election coordinators. Daniels' campaign consultant, Robert McClarty, said the measure has no funding estimate or legislative sponsors, prompting Jim Lagrone, the Democratic incumbent's Republican challenger in the Nov. 7 general election, to accuse Daniels of "firing an idea into the air ... waiting to see if anybody bites." However, Madison County Clerk Faron Ledbetter, president of the Arkansas Association of County Clerks, said the idea has been part of members' ongoing discussions since passage of the federal Help America Vote Act and that he approached Daniels' with the idea to make elections run more smoothly. "Our workload and the counties' have tripled," Ledbetter said. "The training, the workload is overwhelming. We have been talking as an association about what we can to do to take some of the load off." Ledbetter said he believed a majority of the county clerks support the proposal. Lagrone said he was "absolutely thrilled that Mr. Daniels has finally realized that we have problems with our elections. For six months he's been telling us that we have no problem that it's all ES&S' fault." He said he would reserve judgment on Daniels' proposal until the secretary of state provided important details, such as who would select the coordinators whether the positions would be politically partisan. Problems tallying votes caused delays in several counties following the May primaries, and Lagrone blamed Daniels. The secretary of state formed a bipartisan investigative panel that concluded Election Systems and Software Co., to which Daniels awarded a $15 million contract, was largely to blame for failing to deploy enough personnel to support its installation of new electronic voting machines in the state to comply with the federal voting act. Also Wednesday, Lagrone acknowledged that in criticizing Daniels' performance in counting absentee ballots from Arkansas service personnel deployed oversees, he mistakenly left the impression that his son had problems casting an absentee ballot from Iraq. Last week, at a news conference Daniels called to encourage military personnel to request absentee ballots, Lagrone's son, Matt Lagrone, appeared holding a sign referring to the issue of uncounted absentee votes by military personnel. Jim Lagrone said in an interview later that his son served in the military during the 2004 elections and did not have his ballot counted. He said his son voted on his ballot but the county clerk's office did not have a record of it being counted. The GOP candidate said Wednesday that his son was not in Iraq when he experienced problems voting in the 2004 elections. "He was being deployed to Iraq, but was training in Mississippi," Lagrone said at a rally and news conference at Ozark Film and Video Productions in Springdale. Lagrone said he had unintentionally given the impression that his son was overseas while he had problems getting a ballot and voting in the 2004 elections in Arkansas. "I communicated poorly and admit I made a mistake, but have no reason to mislead anyone," he said Wednesday. "When you think about it, it's even worse that we could not get a military vote across the Mississippi River." Daniels said Matt Lagrone received an absentee ballot on Oct. 13, 2004 while training at Camp Shelby, Miss. A state-by-state assessment of access to the ballot for troops stationed overseas was issued in March by the federal Election Assistance Commission. The report said that for the 2004 presidential election Arkansas county clerks mailed 5, 173 absentee ballots to military members and their dependents and U. S. nonmilitary citizens overseas and that slightly less than half, 2, 539 ballots, were returned and counted in the election. |
