Maricopa County Braces for Primary Election Amid Critical CrowdStrike Outage

Officials assure they will have increased resources staffed on Election Day to respond to a similar outage if it were to happen again.

PHOENIX — Maricopa County Elections officials have stated that last week’s global tech outage had minimal impact on vote centers. The disruption occurred in the vote-center ballot-on-demand check-in system rather than the tabulators or voting machines, which were unaffected due to their lack of internet connectivity.

Hundreds of individuals still managed to cast their early ballots despite the issue.

The outage was attributed to an update by CrowdStrike, leaving county officials seeking answers as to why the update was applied to the check-in system.

“We feel like we had a fairly low impact. Still, almost 400 people voted on Friday,” Maricopa County Communications Director Fields Moseley noted. “We opened at 9 a.m. with four vote centers open and had a rolling opening all day long as those were fixed and 40 were opened before the end of the day. None of the tabulators were affected by this. They’re on an air-gap system. They’re not connected to the internet.”

The Republican National Committee and the Republican Party of Arizona have expressed concerns regarding the tech issue, formally addressing them in a letter to the Maricopa County Elections Director. “The most recent occurrence is extremely worrisome due to the online nature of the issue and the implications if this were to happen on Election Day,” the letter said.

Maricopa County Elections leaders have reassured the public that they are prepared for any similar issues on Election Day. “We will have over 240 vote centers open, so if a vote center does go down, people are able to choose from a different vote center, but we will have increased resources, increased technology personnel,” said Maricopa County Deputy Elections Director for Communications Jennifer Liewer. “We are prepared should something occur on Election Day to be able to be responsive.”

Arizona’s Primary Election is approaching, and officials expect the turnout to be around 30% of eligible voters. The county is actively working to dispel misinformation and confusions surrounding the election process.

For the Primary Election, the county has invested $400,000 in advertising to ensure people are ballot-ready. This figure is expected to reach $1.1 million by November’s General Election.

“We can’t stop people from delivering incorrect information, and hopefully, that is tamped down from the correct information being there, but we’ve kind of seen how this cycle works over and over again in recent years,” Moseley concluded.