PHOENIX – Maricopa County has been at the center of election conspiracy theories and denial of the results in each of the last two elections. Now, the voting team is seeing how much greater transparency and clarification of procedures can go into the effort.
2020 saw the Maricopa County Counting and Election Center hundreds of pro-Trump protesterssome armed men gathered in front of the facility a few days after the election and argued without proving that the election was stolen from then-President Donald Trump.
2022 Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has fueled the next round of election conspiracy theory claims. dozens of voting machines malfunctionedcausing delays.
And the latest wave of 2024 election denials had already begun before Tuesday’s primary.
In Maricopa County, where more than 2 million people voted in 2020 in one of the closest states in the country, an onslaught of misinformation, misinformation and noise about the election prompted county election officials to take steps to improve Maricopa County Tabulation and transparency. Election Center. Maricopa also invested about $15 million in new equipment to deliver results more quickly and address skepticism about its results.
One of the steps taken by the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to increase transparency is to add more surveillance cameras to the tabulation center, allowing Arizonans to monitor proceedings from home. The new set of cameras totals more than 20, including observation at the boxes, seven different angles at the list counting center and four different angles where ballots are processed – checking signatures on postal ballots before the ballots themselves are counted – takes place.
All these video angles are available for 24/7 live streaming on the internet Maricopa County website.
“If these cameras weren’t on, maybe people would say, ‘Well, what happens when the cameras aren’t on?'” Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates said. He is not running for another term in 2024 and said last year that he had post-traumatic stress disorder because of the wave of persecution stemming from his role as the administrator of the elections.
In an interview with NBC News, Gates broke down the county’s massive investment in election equipment since 2022. He said $15 million in new equipment, $9 million in new printers and $6 million in new high-speed tabulators.
“One of the things that people have been asking about is how long it takes to count all of our ballots,” Gates said. “This investment in new high-speed tabulators will help speed that process up a bit.”
A major obstacle to speedy vote counting is the crush of mail-in ballots arriving just before or on Election Day, each of which requires signature verification, a time-consuming process. (When someone votes in person, their signature is verified when they register at the polling place, meaning their vote can be tabulated more quickly.) Mail-in voting has been popular in Arizona for years.
So far, Maricopa’s strides toward efficiency and transparency have yet to quell the latest batch of skepticism. After the former Maricopa County election worker accused of stealing a safety deposit box Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Gina Svoboda, jewelry from a polling center, a museum and a number of items from the state legislature appeared to be part of a plan to reduce Republican voter turnout.
“I’m starting to think that people are not deliberately damaging the trust and securing the system so that our people don’t give up and vote,” Svoboda said in an interview with local news in late June. He then threatened the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors.
The Republican National Committee and the Arizona GOP sent a letter to Maricopa County’s director of elections, such as airline reservations, following the CrowdStrike outage that affected early voting centers in Arizona and wide areas of American life earlier this month. requires answers.
“We have a job here, and we can’t do our job of holding elections unless we have a strong partnership with the major political parties,” Gates said of Svoboda’s comments.
“If they’re going to say things that are irresponsible and untrue, that’s not going to get us off track,” Gates said.
Perhaps the biggest pusher of election-related conspiracy theories in the state is Lake, who is seeking the GOP Senate nomination on Tuesday. He made baseless allegations of rigged election after losing the governorship race against the incumbent government. Katie Hobbs two years ago and she made attacks on the Maricopa County election part of her campaign this term.
“If Mohave County is at or near 100%, no matter what they do, they can’t get out of this situation in Maricopa County,” Lake said during a rally in Mohave County this spring. “You know the garbage they put out there,” Lake added.
During a local radio interview in May, Lake said, “Maricopa County is crooked, corrupt. And there is no responsibility.”
The noise and false allegations have damaged Gates and others who work in elections in Maricopa County.
“For the last four years, you know, we’ve had death threats,” Gates said.
“People in our own party who are claiming that we’re traitors, that we’re trying to rig the election, and that’s incredibly disappointing,” added Gates, a lifelong Republican.
Besides Gates, another election official in Maricopa County suffering the most is Recorder Stephen Richer, who is up for re-election this year and faces GOP primary challengers on Tuesday. In June he Posted a video on X Shelby Busch, chairwoman of Arizona’s delegation to the Republican National Convention, said she would “lynch” him if she had the chance. The video was taken from a March 20 live event on Rumble, a conservative video platform in Mesa.
Gates hopes Arizonans can remember the humanity behind the work being done.
“These are not, you know, faceless bureaucrats. These are not just machines that do this job,” Gates said. “These are thousands of people in Maricopa County, our aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, and we owe it to them to make sure people know the truth and good works.”