PHOENIX (AZFamily/AP) — Maricopa County officials held a press conference Tuesday afternoon to discuss the final steps toward securing the 2024 general election. The county has already reported receiving more than one million early voting ballots.
Maricopa County election officials, Sheriff Russ Skinner and Supervisor Bill Gates, discussed efforts related to general law enforcement operations to protect poll workers and ballots in the week leading up to Election Day.
“We make sure we’re overprepared and overestimated for any issues, but not enough to make sure the process happens,” Skinner said. “We don’t want to scare anyone. We just want to make sure that the people inside that building are safe, that they feel safe, and that we have enough staff to respond to the community, if necessary.”
Election officials said they are currently actively monitoring more than 70 vote centers that are open during early voting, out of a total of more than 240. The department had previously said that more than 3,600 temporary workers would be deployed across the Valley on election day.
In addition, the county is seeing record numbers for early voting. Officials said nearly half of the nearly two million voters on the early voter list had already cast their ballots.
Officials said more than 940,000 early ballots were mailed through the U.S. Postal Service and about 75,000 people voted in person.
Election security was a major concern for many, especially after the police spoke about it last week A man in the Valley intentionally set fire to a US Postal Service mailbox in downtown Phoenix. Although the suspect said his actions were not politically motivated, more than a dozen ballots were damaged in the fire, authorities said.
The sheriff said the county has not seen an increase in election-related threats or violent plans as it has seen in previous presidential election cycles.
“A lot of it now has to do with threats to people participating in the election process, to dignitaries or elected officials. We haven’t had a lot of them, which is a good thing, but we definitely saw that in 2020,” Sheriff Skinner said.
Superintendent Gates explained that the county is working to assess the dangers of the age of disinformation, especially in social media and other digital spaces.
“For two reasons. One is that security (…) understands the people who are going there and they threaten election officials, they threaten elected officials on social media. It’s something to watch,” Gates said. “But we’re also monitoring social media because we understand that we’re now in an environment where there are foreign actors and people in this country spreading false information about the election.”
in Oregon, hundreds of ballots were damaged after a tipping box caught fire on two separate occasions earlier this month.
Arizona remains a major electoral battleground four years after the president Joe Biden He was only the second presidential candidate from the Democratic Party carry the state In almost 70 years. It is one of four states in the nation’s Sun Belt that have been the focus of two presidential campaigns in the final sprint to Election Day.
Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican ex-president Donald Trump in a hot contest for the state’s 11 electoral votes. They and their partners have since secured their parties’ nominations in the summer stopped several campaigns Mother is there.
Another competitive race includes the race for the US Senate, where the Democrats Ruben Gallego and republican Kari Lake Independent U.S. Sen. Kirsten Sinema is running to replace Biden in the two 2020 U.S. House Republican seats in the Phoenix and Tucson districts.
In the state legislature, Democrats hope to win the state Senate for the first time since 1992 and the state House for the first time since 1966, the last time the party controlled the governorship and both houses at the same time.
Voters will decide on state-wide voting measures on abortion and immigration, in addition or two competing ballot measures requiring abolish the use of party primaries in state elections.
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