Arkansas

Act 405 of 2025 fixed the preferential primary at the first Tuesday after the first Monday in March of every even year — it was May in midterms as recently as 2022. A scheduler carrying the historical rule fires ten weeks late and misses the election entirely, along with the filing window it dragged to the previous November.

The nonpartisan judicial 'general election' is held on primary day (§7-10-102), so judicial winners exist in March — and races short of a majority go to runoffs held on the November general itself, eight months later. This cycle added an appointee trap: both Supreme Court seats belonged to appointed justices barred from succeeding themselves, so the two incumbents ran for each other's seats. An incumbency model keyed to seat continuity mislinks both.

County elections are run by three party appointees — two majority, one minority (§7-4-102) — chosen by county party committees each odd-year January. Since 2021 the State Board of Election Commissioners can decertify them and take over a county's election: it removed all three Searcy County commissioners in June 2025 over the county's hand count, and has Pulaski and Izard under review. An entity graph keyed to named administrators goes stale without warning.

In Arkansas the county judge runs county government — roads, budget, a veto over the quorum court — and judges nothing (Amendment 55). The justices of the peace are the county legislature, elected partisan from districts every two years. A title-based classifier files both under the judiciary and corrupts seventy-five counties twice over.

A model with one runoff offset is wrong twice here. Party primary runoffs land four weeks after the primary (March 31, with a compressed one-week early-vote window). Judicial and school runoffs land on the November general itself. County and municipal general-election runoffs land four weeks after the general — December 1 — under a process Act 991 of 2025 just unified. Statewide and federal generals have no runoff at all: plurality wins.

Arkansas's initiative process is alive but the chokepoint moved. Courts enjoined most of the 2023–25 restrictions — the 50-county spread, the reading-level rule, canvasser mandates — and the only citizen measure died anyway: the Secretary of State ruled every petition page invalid because it carried the wrong popular-name caption. A model that predicts ballot access from signature counts misses that the caption is now a kill vector. November carries legislative referrals only.

The SoS is transitioning election-night reporting to enr.totalresults.com/arkansas — a fragment-routed single-page app keyed by per-election UUIDs — and says some historical downloads are temporarily unavailable during the move. A scraper built on the previous portal pattern is pointed at a dead surface, and the archive's numeric IDs migrated with it.

Arkansas townships have no government — but each one still elects a constable, partisan, every two years, on a layer of geography most models deleted. The state GIS office carries 820 township polygons, and the count moves: county judges can consolidate townships and silently delete the offices, a power the state Supreme Court upheld in 2020.