Officials have pledged to have extra staff on hand on Election Day in case a similar outage occurs again.
PHOENIX — The Maricopa County Board of Elections says last week’s global technology outage had a minimal impact on vote centers. It didn’t affect tabulation or voting machines because they’re not connected to the internet. What was affected was the vote centers’ on-demand vote check-in system.
Hundreds of people were still able to vote early.
The IT issue was caused by a CrowdStrike update, and county officials are still trying to understand why CrowdStrike forced the update on its check-in system.
Related: Bad actors seek to exploit global tech outages for profit
“We believe the impact was minimal. Still, we had about 400 people vote on Friday,” said Fields Moseley, Maricopa County’s communications director. “We opened the polling stations at 9 a.m. and had four polling sites open. Then as those sites came back up, we opened more polling sites throughout the day, and by the end of the day, 40 had been opened. None of the counting machines were affected. They are running on an air-gapped system and are not connected to the internet.”
The Republican National Committee and the Arizona Republican Party sent a letter to the Maricopa County Board of Elections expressing concerns about the technology issues.
“Recent events are extremely disturbing given the online nature of the issues and the impact they could have if they occurred on Election Day,” the letter said.
Maricopa County Board of Elections leaders were asked what would happen if the county faced similar technical issues on Election Day.
“We’re going to have over 240 vote centers open, so if a vote center goes down, people can choose another vote center, but we’ll have increased resources and increased technical staff,” said Jennifer Lewer, deputy director of public affairs for Maricopa County Elections. “We’ll be prepared to respond if anything happens on Election Day.”
Related: CrowdStrike CEO asked to testify before Congress about company’s role in global tech outage
With Arizona’s primary election just a week away and the total turnout expected to reach about 30% of the eligible voters, the county is also working hard to dispel misinformation and misconceptions among voters as it handles the heavy lifting of running an election.
The county said it spent $400,000 in the primary alone on advertising encouraging people to prepare to vote.
They expect to spend about $1.1 million on ads by the November general election.
“You can’t stop people from spreading misinformation and hopefully the right information will curb it, but we’ve seen this cycle play out over and over again over the last few years,” Moseley said.
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