State Board Decertifies Phillips County Poll Workers After November Election Complaints

The Arkansas State Board of Election Commissioners voted on Aug. 5, 2025 to decertify Phillips County Election Commissioner John Dalencourt for four years and poll worker Dennis Jasper for 14 years, acting on testimony about what went wrong at the voting site in Elaine during the November 2024 elections.

Dalencourt faced sanctions for two failures on Election Day, Nov. 4: he was not present at the polling place at 6:45 a.m. as the state board had directed following a similar violation in 2022, and the board held him responsible for the Elaine site not opening at 7:30 a.m. as required by law. The board had initially weighed a 14-year decertification for Dalencourt before reducing it to four years after objections from Dalencourt himself and from Commissioner James Harmon Smith.

Jasper's punishment was steeper, in part because he did not appear at his own hearing. Harmon Smith, who cast the lone vote against sanctioning Dalencourt, said he had no problem supporting Jasper's decertification after the poll worker did not show up. Charlie Morris, the state board's election administration supervisor, and Phillips County election monitor Alexi Thomas both corroborated the allegations against the two men. The board also issued letters of reprimand to other election workers for failing to fulfill their duties.

The Nov. 4 problems were not the only complications Phillips County faced that election cycle. All 152 absentee ballots had to be duplicated because the county's voting machines could not process the creases in the paper from being folded and mailed, according to Phillips County Election Commission chairman Wayne Boals. A state board monitor helped county staff count and duplicate ballots through Nov. 10. Boals noted that the monitor did not observe anyone receiving the wrong ballot, which he called encouraging and an indication that whatever issues existed were corrected at that time.

Technological difficulties and strained working relationships among county officials had complicated Phillips County's compliance with state law, according to both Boals and a state board official identified in reports as Shults, whose full name and title could not be confirmed. State law requires county officials to electronically transmit vote totals to the Secretary of State immediately after calculating results, a responsibility held by the county election commissioners, the county clerk, or an agreement between them.

The state board also sent a monitor to neighboring Lee County after residents reported receiving incorrect or incomplete ballots during early and absentee voting. Shults said the board would review all observations that appeared to indicate something was incorrect about the election process and weigh the full context after the election. After an investigation, the board can issue warnings, fines, or other sanctions. Shults expected the board to investigate Lee County as well, though no formal vote on that step had been taken.

The Elaine failures echo complaints that stretch back to 2022, when the state board filed a formal complaint against the Phillips County Election Commission over ballot errors, polling locations that opened late, and the mixing of early votes and Election Day votes. The state board has now deployed election monitors to Phillips County during the current election cycle to observe operations directly.