Eighth Circuit Agrees with Lower Court that Arkansas Can’t Block E-Signatures on Voter Registration Forms

Posted on by March 31, 2026

On March 31, the Eighth Circuit agreed with the U.S. District Court that Arkansas can’t stop recognizing electronic signatures on voter registration forms. Get Loud Arkansas v Jester, 24-2810. The basis is the 1964 federal Civil Rights Law, which said that voting and registration can’t be invalidated if the reason for invalidation is not “material” to an accurate and fair voting system.

The vote was 2-1. The decision was written by Judge Steven M. Colloton (a Bush Jr. appointee) and also signed by Judge Ralph R. Erickson (a Trump appointee). Judge David Stras (a Trump appointee) dissented.

Here is the decision.

Comments

Eighth Circuit Agrees with Lower Court that Arkansas Can’t Block E-Signatures on Voter Registration Forms — 36 Comments

  2. Terrible law + terrible judges + terrible precedents stacked on top of each other = screwy mess.

  4. It was always ok (according to these scumbags). But now they’re saying it’s not ok for any state to try to keep it from becoming way easier to do on an industrial scale than it already was.

  6. RW,

    Because banks verify funds and identities of people opening accounts in other ways, contracts generally require notarization, and there are individual or corporate incentives and recourses when one side cheats.

    With voter registration, when a fraudulent one is submitted, the negative effects of the fraud are dispersed among all voters, unlike with a financial transactions or contract. Thus only government agencies might catch the fraud, and in addition to being woefully inefficient and not particularly incentivized they also have a conflict of interest –

    Most voter registration fraud is committed by interests which want to expand the size and scope of government even faster.

  7. This is where Mr. Winger might say that voter registration fraud is rare. But that’s because he’s only counting the cases where it is caught. See above as to why it is rarely caught by government agencies and prosecuted , much less proven in a court of law.

    At most, bureaucrats might remove a few of the fraudulent registrations and those are just the tip of the iceberg.

  8. Having worked with VR databases – I’ve seen lots of suspiciously old people who hadn’t voted in decades, lots of likely duplicates, etc.

    If people check that they are US citizens on a form, who is really likely to check into it and catch it if they are lying?

    If people move around a lot and don’t put down their previous address when they update, how likely is anyone to catch that the are registered at more than one address? What if they put down minor variations of their name?

    People are not supposed to register at secondary, business, or mailing addresses, but it’s easy to get mail forwarded and to get mailing addresses that look like street addresses through PMBs or private individuals or businesses forwarding mail. People can have multiple of these all over the place.

    The chance of getting caught is extremely low. And if caught, by far the most likely consequence is losing one of the fraudulent registrations. Proving bad intent is difficult and incentives to do so are lacking. When you get into high crime areas where people move a lot, much more serious (in the eyes of cops) crimes usually fall through the cracks, much less fraud with dispersed effects.

    Many / most / all states issue drivers licenses or stare ids to non citizens. Some at least issue them to illegals and temporary visa holders. If they check yes on a VR form and move around a lot – well, good luck.

  9. I’ve seen urban large population counties where voter registration offices had rows and rows of boxes of deceased people to be taken off voter rolls. It’s probably not done that way anymore. The evidence may not be something you’ll ever see if you are in a voter registration office. So, the fraud has probably only become exponentially worse in the decades since.

    Voter roll purges,when they happen at all, often consist only of seeing whether voter mail bounces and or a vote is cast once in several elections. That would not catch most of the kinds of fraud described above (and many others I didn’t even get into ) when absentee voting and absentee registration have become so prevalent.

    Remove the wet ink signature and it’s even easier.

    I’ve used e-sigs with a few financial transactions. It’s literally typing in a name and the computer turns it into fake cursive. Others have you finger a screen and as long as the card has funded and you make some kind of mark no one ever checks if your signature matches how it looks anywhere else. Hell they don’t even check if your the chrxkname matches. They rely on the financial institutions to do all the checking.

  10. Mr. Wingers talking point here is disingenuous. If u dig into the details. Maybe not on his part.

  12. Let’s be fair. Maybe he’s just got really rosy colored glasses through which he views the world, plus takes fake news talking points seriously.

  13. If you will allow me to elaborate. I have seen Mr. Winger say illegals don’t commit crimes, because he personally knows a few illegals and they are (at least as far as he knows) really nice people who are scared of authorities and very law abiding, aside from immigration laws.

    And, yes, those kinds of illegals exist. But it takes only a few seconds of watching news, internet research, real life experience in rough neighborhoods, or any number of ways of interfacing with reality to know other kinds of illegals exist who do routinely commit crimes against individuals. Every type of crime there is.

    You’d also have to, know that illegal alien criminals are harder to catch than homegrown or even legal immigrant criminals for a variety of reasons – language barriers, uncooperative victims, lack of US criminal records, higher tendency to move around and blend in uncooperative communities, etc, etc. So the level of illegal alien crime is not really reflected in stats.

  14. Or, take the talking point that they “do not use welfare because they are not eligible for welfare.”

    But, their kids go to schools funded by property taxes. They go to hospitals and often do not pay the bills. Those bills get paid through your insurance and your taxes if you pay those. Many of them are eligible for state or municipal aid of various kinds, or through various organizations that are tax funded. They use public infrastructure and public services, including when they do,get apprehended for crimes.

    Many of them work under fake SSNs, so why would anyone think they would not get welfare under fake SSNs? And then they cause all sorts of problems for people whose identities they steal.

    We can go,on and on.

    If you have rosy colored glasses on, trust fake news media , and assume the best of people because they seem nice and reasonable when you talk to,them
    … Well, you don’t have to actually knowingly support forgery and fraud – you just end up supporting it unknowingly …

    The road to hell is paved with good intentions. As well as bad ones.

  15. In every state, the county vital statistics office routinely forwards copies of death certificates to the appropriate county elections office.

  16. Richard Winger

    Yes, they do, at least in theory. There are about 3,000 counties with populations ranging from less than 100 (a single ranch in Texas) to LA County CA, at one time estimates over 10 million, now back down to 9.7 m. So blithely assuming that this always happens as it’s supposed to when it comes to all of those government offices is not an assumption I’ll make without question as Richard Winger does..

    But please note that it doesn’t contradict anything said above.

    What I reported seeing was rows of boxes of those exact notices “to be processed.” There was no way to tell how long those boxes had been sitting there. Nor is that any reason to believe it’s being done more efficiently with electronic notices. It may be worse.

    And looking at the database, there were quite a few records which showed high promise of being lost somewhere in those rows of boxes – people ostensibly of the triple digit age range who had not moved in multiple decades. While such people do exist, there were suspiciously many of them. Some still voted regularly. Others hadn’t voted in decades either. Both kinds of people exist in real life, but the percentages were suspicious especially in light of those boxes. How long had they been accumulating there?

    Note that is just one of many points and questions above. I and others made. Yet Richard Winger addresses only a contention nobody made – and only bolsters one of the points above.

  19. IF TRUMP WAS A TYRANT THE nAZi-666 SPAMBOT WOULD BE ALREADY DEPROGRAMMED, ITS PROGRAMMER WOULD BE DEAD OR IN A SECRET PRISON, AND THIS WEBSITE WOULD ALREADY BE OFFLINE !!!

  20. MICH GOP DID GOOD. ROTTEN COMMIE VOMIT RCV NEEDS TO BE PURGED EVERYWHERE.

    LIKE MAIL BALLOTS, RCV IS MORE VOTE FRAUD ENABLING TYRANNY !!! KUDOS TO LIBERATOR TRUMP FOR TRYING TO LIBERATE US FROM IT !!!
    HOPEFULLY SUPREME KANGAROOS AND OR CONGRESS AGREE AND WE GET TO LITERALLY SAVE AMERICA JUST IN THE NICK OF TIME !!!

  21. Michigan GOP did bad by inviting the commie scum. Mr. Maddock did good by running them off. He is an hero.

  23. 0.000666 IQ polisci morons [ESP TYRANT TRUMP FASCISTS] love having the current ANTI-democracy ROT —

    plurality-MINORITY nominations / plurality-MINORITY elections / MINORITY rule gerrymanders
    ——
    NOOO primaries
    PR — MAJORITY RULE
    APPV
    TOTSOP

  27. 0.000666 IQ is infinitely smarter than the AZ-666 SPAMBOT is programmed to emulate. It’s Absolute Zero IQ is the same as negative infinity, for those unfamiliar with how real science works.

  30. “polisci” is some Orwellian Ingsoc newspeak for something which it would be an insult both to junk and to science to call junk science. You have to be way dumber than a moron to take it seriously.

  32. TYRANT TRUMP FASCISTS is a multiple contradiction in terms.

    For one thing, demon rats are closer to fascist than Republicans are. For another , Trump is the least fascist Republican president since demon rat FDR and Benito Mussolini were a mutual admiration society before the war.

    Look it up. It’s true.

    And for another …

  34. And for another,

    IF TRUMP WAS A TYRANT THE nAZi-666 SPAMBOT WOULD BE ALREADY DEPROGRAMMED, ITS PROGRAMMER WOULD BE DEAD OR IN A SECRET PRISON, AND THIS WEBSITE WOULD ALREADY BE OFFLINE !!!

    Also:

    A parody of the site comments here would be Retard fetish porn.

  35. “love having the current…”

    The people that the AZ SPAMBOT keeps mischaracterizing as fans of fascism and tyranny – actually, it and it’s programmer are much closer to those than we are – don’t love current anything, especially ROT.

    The problems the spambot mentions are accelerating as we drift ever closer to democracy / dumbocracy / idiocracy / mob rule.

    The spambot doesn’t know anything except screaming slogan repetition, misdefined terms, and spinning fake news to make them even more fake, plus insults, so it never wondered why.

    On the off chance anyone capable of thought who doesn’t already know is reading, feel free to ask questions and or look up problems or criticisms of democracy and historical facts such as what US founders thought about it .

    The US was not a “democracy;” it was a Republic. Look up the old US army manual about the dangers of democracy, and so on.

  36. “plurality-MINORITY nominations / plurality-MINORITY elections / MINORITY rule gerrymanders
    ——
    NOOO primariesthi
    PR — MAJORITY RULE
    APPV
    TOTSOP”

    The only thing the spambot gets right is no primaries. All the others make things worse. And even no primaries would work way differently than it suggests.

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