A failed petition to ban voting machines in Saline County has been referred to an ethics committee after issues were found with the way signatures for the petition were collected. Members of the Arkansas Legislature made the decision Monday at a Joint Performance Review Committee Meeting.

The ballot measure would have mandated votes in the county be made without a machine and counted by hand. Restore Election Integrity Arkansas is led in part by Col. Conrad Reynolds, who told Little Rock Public Radio before that he does not trust voting machines.

Reynolds has said voting machines could be flipping votes to select more moderate Republicans over more conservative candidates. Little Rock Public Radio has not been able to verify these claims, and critics of hand counting say its expensive, costly and prone to error.

The legislators brought up a Facebook post by a man named Joshua James, whose profile says he lives in New Mexico. James posted on Facebook in July “The Arkansas PAPER BALLOT initiative is in need of 15-20 full time signature gatherers for 2 weeks.”

My personal favorite part :

The legislative committee Monday also alleged that canvassers or representatives from the group may have been altering documents. Under each signature page the canvassers collected, the address was blacked out and replaced with the same Conway hotel address. Two notaries testified that they did not see the alterations to the documents when they notarized them.

Sen. Jonathan Dismang, R-Beebe, called the situation ironic since the argument for paper ballots is that they are more secure : “The same group that wants paper ballots is okay with altering notarized documents before submission.”