TEXARKANA, Ark. - Arkansas Secretary of State John Thurston was the guest speaker at the Miller County Republican Committee's monthly meeting Tuesday evening. He spoke primarily about voting rights, voting access and the importance of preventing voter fraud.
Thurston, who was first elected Secretary of State in November 2018 and is seeking re-election for one more term, emphasized the importance of voting in-person at the polls when speaking about the absentee process and vote-by-mail systems that are in place in some other states.
"If you want to make for certain that your vote is counted, in my opinion, you go to the polls," he said. "There's a lot that can happen in the absentee process. Everybody knows it, and if anybody wants to act like it can't, then I don't know what planet they're coming from."
Thurston also said the state of Arkansas had a record number of voters in the general election. There were 1,223,777 ballots cast in 2020 for the presidential election, compared to 1,137,772 in the 2016 election.
There were just over 741,000 early voters in 2020, and only around 564,000 in 2016.
There were 115,722 absentee voters in 2020, and 42,738 in 2016.
Thurston said absentee voting numbers jumped due to COVID, but not quite as much as he anticipated.
He attributed what he called a "smooth election" to the election equipment that was available in all counties in the state. The first-ever post-election audit showed that every vote cast was counted, he said.
Thurston spoke about redistricting as well.
He said the fact that Arkansas doesn't have consensus data at the block level to aid in the redistricting process is a "political" issue from the federal level.
"Gathering the data, they blamed COVID last year. And I get that," he said. "But if you have the numbers, and we got the total, why do we not have it at the block level?"
He said the state is behind currently in the redistricting process because of this issue.
Voter ID laws were strengthened in the last legislative session, Thurston said. Voters have to have an ID to vote as of now.
He ended his soliloquy by saying he doesn't want to infringe on any voter's rights, but at the same time, he wants to do everything he can to make the process as secure and accurate as possible.
"We want it to be easy to vote and hard to cheat," Thurston said. "And I want it to be harder to cheat than it is easy to vote."