Legislative Watch April 2023
The Legislative Session is officially over but that doesn’t mean there are no updates. The Arkansas Legislature passed a bill requiring every school and campus to have a Naloxene rescue kit available. Some refer to this as a Narcan kit, but it’s a nasal device that can save someone’s life in the event of an opioid overdose. Given the lack of rehabs in rural Arkansas and the increasing amount of overdose deaths, we applaud the state’s effort to combat this crisis.
More than twenty bills passed in the 2023 Regular Session address Arkansas elections.
From Arkansashouse.org:
Act 350 states that a county that chooses to use paper ballots in place of approved voting machines shall be responsible for the cost of the paper ballots and any devices or machines required for printing and tabulation. It also states that each paper ballot shall be compatible with the electronic vote tabulation devices selected by the Secretary of State.
Act 236 amends the procedure for the filing of a ballot initiative and referendum petition by requiring that signatures are gathered from at least 50 counties. Currently, signatures are required from 15 counties.
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The legislature has done what it couldn’t do on the ballot, making petitioning exceptionally harder and more expensive. This will make it harder to get citizen-led initiatives on the ballot in the future and it could impact the ability for Independent candidates to run.
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The thought of paper ballots coming to Baxter County continues to haunt us. Visions of hanging chads dance in our heads. It’s completely unnecessary and costly, though the new local brand of GOP X-TREME aka the Ozark Patriots are pushing for paper ballots. As we all have now seen there was no problem with the electronic voting systems, Fox knows this because they had to pay nearly a billion dollars for defamation against the Dominion voting systems. Next up the My Pillow Guy was ordered to pay 5 million after his election claims were debunked. (He had previously offered up this pot of money to anyone who could prove him wrong, and when they did he refused to pay up.).
Though these claims of stolen elections have been debunked again and again, they still get embraced by the fringe element of the party formerly known as Republicans.
