Press Release – Craighead County Clerk Kade Holliday
Recently my office received notification from the Secretary of State’s office of a number of felons that were due to be processed and updated. While this is normally a straightforward process, pause was given considering the size of the file, that it was sent in an effort to match from a new data source, and the considerable time span covered with the information received.
In Craighead County we typically process any felons immediately upon sentencing thanks
in part to information received from the Craighead County Circuit Clerk’s Office; however, we do count on these updates from the state about offenders in other counties to continually cleanse data.
Upon additional communication with the Secretary of State’s office about potential concerns with the data, it was communicated to us to proceed with the processing as we deemed appropriate. Thankfully, we were able to work with our Probation and Parole office who offered to help check each of the 153 individuals on the list to ensure which individual’s sentences had been fulfilled or pardoned and which were still outstanding.
Through this additional layer of data scrubbing, 91 individuals were found to have had their sentences fulfilled. The remaining individuals were either unfulfilled or incarcerated and we processed those individuals in the normal way by flagging them from registration and sending a letter to inform them of this and the steps necessary to reinstate voting rights after their sentence was fulfilled.
I am thankful for the diligent work of the deputy clerks who handle voting here in Craighead County as well as the Probation and Parole workers for their hard work and dedication to ensuring that those individuals whose sentences were completed were not falsely denied their rights to vote in upcoming elections.
If anyone has any questions or concerns about their voter eligibility I highly encourage you to check the status of your registration at http://www.voterview.ar-nova.org or contact our office at 870-933-4520.
According to a report from KARK, old felon data could prevent voters from being able to cast ballots.
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