Entire Searcy County Election Commission resigns Cites threats of felony prosecution

Published 5:00 am Wednesday, September 23, 2026

MARSHALL – “As a result of a series of incidents in recent weeks, I do not have confidence that the voter database is without errors. It will be impossible to be sure that voters have been assigned to their proper precincts or that the ballots will be correctly assigned during the November election,” Chairman of the Searcy County Election Commission Laurie Gross read to the public during a Friday election commission meeting in Marshall.

For these reasons, and fearing prosecution as a result, Laurie Gross, Kenneth Weekley and L.C. Ratchford resigned from the Searcy County Election Commission. This has left the county without an election commission.

What went wrong?

In April, after this year’s primary election, the commission put in motion a plan to redistrict the county. Gross said the plan was in line with what the state had been encouraging counties to do and the move from 15 to 7 districts would save the county a lot of money.

The commissioners were assured that there would be ample time before the general election for voters’ addresses to be updated within their new precincts in the relevant voter software, Gross said. The software is a voter registration and election management system called PowerProfile, maintained by the company ES&S. Gross said they received additional assurances from the Arkansas Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Office that voter addresses would be automatically updated and would not require a manual transfer.

A couple of months later, the commission began assembling ballots after it was told that the transfer of voter information into the new precincts was complete. However, they paused after noticing discrepancies. Working with the county clerk, they learned that the rolls had only 9 registered voters in the city of Leslie, for example.

Because direct access to PowerProfile is limited to the county clerk and ES&S, the commission could not check the entire database. The commission described ES&S’s customer support as “hard to get ahold of,” with inquiries taking days to receive a response.

Gross said, “The software we were assured would make it easy for the clerk wasn’t even working.” She’d had to manually move each person’s address to the new database.

With legal deadlines imminent, the Searcy County Election Commission recently held an emergency meeting with Chris Madison, Director of the State Board of Election Commissioners, they explained. The Searcy commissioners explained the problem and asked what the consequences would be if someone ended up with the wrong ballot.

“He laughed at the whole thing,” Ratchford, the democratic representative on the commission, said of Madison’s response. The other commissioners verified that Madison laughed at their questions and told them that both the county clerk and the commissioners held equal responsibility.

For the Searcy County commission, this is no laughing matter. Last year, they faced state scrutiny after Searcy County Republican and Democratic organizations supported moving to hand-counted ballots for the 2024 election.

Initially, the commission received a 14-year decertification, later reversed, in part, for renting video equipment from the Arkansas Voter Integrity Initiative to monitor the hand count. The state board instead issued reprimands for accepting something of value from an unapproved source and failing to maintain a publicly posted list of election workers.

The Searcy County commission maintains that the $100 paid to rent the equipment was in the best interest of the taxpayers, with Gross calling it “demonstrated animosity” from the state. They categorize the incident as “getting in trouble for not spending enough money.”

Against this backdrop, the commission doesn’t believe that, given their uncertainty with ballot integrity, the state wouldn’t prosecute them.

“We were fairly sure that we could not guarantee that all the voters in this county were in the right place in the poll book, or that all of the precincts were apportioned correctly. Which meant that we could not guarantee that some voters might not get the wrong ballot and vote the wrong ballot in this upcoming election,” Gross said.

The commission referenced A.C.A. § 7-1-104(a)(13). It criminalizes the act of knowingly permitting someone to vote any but his or her ballot. Because the Searcy County Commission is reasonably sure someone may receive the wrong ballot in November, they could be construed as knowing people will get the wrong ballot.

The penalty, a Class D felony, can carry both a 6-year prison term and a $10,000 fine.

Ratchford explained his reasoning, “This is not a level playing field. I have to weigh the chances of one voter, one, being handed the wrong ballot.” He said the consequences of that could cause him to lose the right to vote, carry a gun, keep employment or freedom.

Even if they aren’t found guilty, the commission knows firsthand how many hours and money they spent defending themselves last year.

“That is our relationship with the state that is now saying, ‘we’re going to hold you accountable for something you have no control over, you can’t guarantee and you don’t know,’” Ratchford said.

If Searcy County can’t quickly reconstitute an election commission, state law provides mechanisms for the State Board of Election Commissioners to assist with the county’s election administration. State law provides a process for filling county election commission vacancies through political parties, but whether anyone will do so, given the perceived consequences, remains to be seen.

Some poll workers in attendance made it clear that they would not participate in the upcoming election without guarantees that they would not be prosecuted for ballot errors.

At the time of publication, the Times has not received answers to inquiries sent on Monday afternoon to ES&S, Chris Madison or the Searcy County clerk.