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 cast their ballots,” said the spokesperson.
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.
Reports from the Maricopa County Recorder indicate that voting machines are malfunctioning county-wide due to the #CrowdStrike outage. Understandable, but frustrating.
The question is: why isn’t there a contingency plan? Why is the county simply throwing their hands up and… pic.twitter.com/fbcy3JA9yC
— Mark Stewart – Chandler, Arizona City Council (@MarkStewart_AZ) July 19, 2024
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, 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.
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 ot early voting.
“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.
From the office of the Secretary of State: Addressing the global issue connected to Crowdstrike pic.twitter.com/jpzFbM9Q3V
— Arizona Secretary of State (@AZSecretary) July 19, 2024