Arizona Early Vote Failures
Arizona Early Vote Failures
Crowdstrike Disrupts Maricopa, Pima, and Pinal County
In 2022, Maricopa County’s conservative groups drove people to vote only on election day and to bring their own pens, hoping to outsmart the Left’s schemes in 2020. What happened? Claims of printer failures and incorrect ballot paper specifications arose, but only on election day and primarily in heavily red districts. Now, we might be witnessing a test run to disrupt and disenfranchise early voters in 2024.
Arizona law mandates every county to have a contingency plan for power outages or failed election equipment. Unfortunately, when we contacted local supervisors and recorders after the 2020 and 2022 elections, those plans were either nonexistent or outdated. Most were vague, consisting of a short paragraph or two stating that ballots would be transferred to a neighboring county with power for tabulation. None of the contingency plans accounted for a full-state power outage.
This is why we need every capable volunteer to step up as a poll worker and to hold critical local positions in managing elections, including the roles of recorder, election director, and administrator in these offices. We also need people to train in curing mail-in ballots and hand counting. We must stop questioning from the outside and start knowing what’s happening from the inside.
Maricopa isn’t alone. We need to assess how many states and districts are at risk and work to mitigate failures like this to ensure we succeed in our vital mission to win the early vote!
Outage Disrupts Arizona Elections Operations Prompting Concerns
Arizona and Independent News Network | ADI Staffer | 7-19-24
The disruption of Arizona’s elections operations due to Microsoft’s global IT outage has prompted concerns of election integrity, with officials and election-oriented reporters scrambling to correct the record.
Maricopa County’s sitebooks, which allow voter check-ins, were impacted by the outage. As relayed through the county online and to various reporters, sitebooks operate through a virtual private network (VPN) and aren’t closed and air-gapped.
That prompted questions about the election system’s connection to the internet, given the county’s past statements that the systems aren’t connected to the internet. Richer again maintained the check-in systems have internet connection, not the tabulation equipment.
Elections department spokesperson Adrian Borunda said in a statement that check-in and ballot casting equipment were connected online.
“The vote center equipment is connected via a network to facilitate voter check-in and ballot casting,” said the spokesperson. *Note: This is not a secure system!
Chandler City Councilman Mark Stewart questioned why the county didn’t have a contingency plan for outages. Stewart said these kinds of issues didn’t happen in the past, and compared Maricopa County’s response to that of Chandler’s, in which Chandler had a contingency plan that enabled them to return the city to online functions within several hours of the outage. *Click on the post below and send a word of praise and encouragement!
Christine Reagan, Act for America Director of Grassroots and Communications, Replied: The office of SOS has not required a real contingency plan for many prior elections. The contingency plan, which provides an alternative election procedure manual for any outages, is required by statute. A printed poll book and hand count contingency must also be required.
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer responded with multiple back-to-back posts to rebut Stewart. He insisted that Maricopa County did have contingency plans, and claimed that some of Chandler’s systems were still down too.
“Let’s play a game on ‘it didn’t use to be that way.’ Tell me about that. Let’s see what you actually know about elections. Tell me when there weren’t e-pollbooks,” said Richer.
Stewart responded that, per their city manager, Chandler’s services were active.
Some disgruntled voters took to posting Maricopa County’s map of all voting locations [Red Indicates Closed], asking why so many locations were closed during this early voting period. Most of these locations don’t open until the upcoming primary election day on July 30, which Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer replied.
“This is like pulling up a map of Chick-Fil-As on Sunday and saying, ‘OMG!!!!!’” responded Richer.
As of Thursday, Maricopa County reported over 319,000 early ballot packet returns.
Both Pinal and Pima counties also experienced issues with their elections systems due to the outage. While Pinal County was able to restore early voting within hours of the outage, Pima County was only able to operate on a limited basis by providing provisional ballots for early voters.*Alert-ACLU of Arizona has reported as many as 30% of provisional ballots are not counted. Verify your vote has been cured at your local election office or wait to cast that ballot if it’s due to a power outage and report this to the RNC.
The global outage occurred after Microsoft’s security partner, CrowdStrike, initiated a faulty system update. CrowdStrike said in a statement that the outage wasn’t due to a cyber attack or security incident.
Both governmental and non-governmental entities were hit by the outage that began Thursday night. Near midday Friday, Microsoft reported that all downed systems had been restored.
Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said in a statement addressing the CrowdStrike outage that his office worked with the Arizona Department of Homeland Security as well as CrowdStrike to prevent disruptions to early voting.
It’s called conventional hand-count elections and printed poll books. It doesn’t get more simple!
“Elections IT and security professionals quickly helped identify and implement the fix to our supporting systems,” said Fontes. “We have restored full access to the agency computers that are used for verifying petition signatures.”
Fontes also clarified that vote tabulation systems were closed off on a separate system from that infrastructure which supports elections operations, such as email.
“It is important to note that vote counting was not impacted at all by this event,” said Fontes.
Christine Reagan, Act for America Director of Grassroots and Communications, Replied: Your office is required by statute to ensure emergency contingency plans are fully operational. You have not followed the law if you're turning voters away. Early voting should experience no disruptions. We won't accept another "printer failure" or "wrong ballot paper" excuse. Click on the SOS Adrian Fontes post above to see the complete string of comments and help us hold him accountable!
Notice that Fontes does not mention vote center closures, failed electronic poll books, the lack of printed poll books, or voters being turned away and forced to use provisional ballots. Elections belong to the people, and those responsible for administering them should always have redundancy plans in place. If we had hand-count elections, none of these problems would exist. The reliability and transparency of hand-counting ensure an accurate voting process that upholds the integrity of our elections, providing a fail-safe against the technical failures that undermine public trust.
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