The days of precinct voting in person, only on election day, have gone the way of cheap leaded gasoline, bobby socks, and Poodle Skirts. Whether we like it or not, voting by mail and early voting are here to stay. Politicians are not likely to go against the will of the vast majority of voters.
The wisdom of early engaging in the voting process has been affirmed by two cases that have been brought to our attention.
One is the case of Summer, who posted this on Twitter:
In response to our request for comment, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer had this reply:
“No, we are not able to know what happened given that this particular voter has not shared any information with us. We do not know who “Summer @azinthegarden” is, much less who her child is.
We did, however, respond to the comment: https://x.com/RecordersOffice/status/1814092487230914936
As you know, voter list maintenance is a priority of my office. We removed over 400,000 in my first three years in office — by far the most ever in a three year period.
You can see information and statistics on our lawful list maintenance efforts at this website: https://elections.maricopa.gov/voter-registration/voter-registration-cancellation.html
There are, however, only certain circumstances in which we can cancel or inactivate a voter registration. And we always send notifications. For example, if we send out election mail, but it comes back as undeliverable through USPS, we cannot simply cancel that voter registration. We would first have to send an additional notice to that voter, wait a certain period of time, and then move that voter to inactive.”
Whatever inconvenience this may have caused, it would have been much better for everyone involved if the initial change of address request had taken place earlier than it did.
The second case has to do with the CrowdStrike patch failure that took place today.
According to the Maricopa County Recorder, this failure had no impact on mail in ballots and whatever minimal impact it had elsewhere was quickly resolved.
“It had no impact on voter registration, other than we had to reset all our computers this morning and that took some time.
It had no impact on mail voting, other than we couldn’t access our computers this morning.
It had no impact on mail ballot requests, as it did not affect our website.
It had an impact on in-person recording, but we were able to have two front-counter spots open by 8:00 AM.”
We dodged the bullet in this case, but it could have been worse, far worse.
These two incidents should be a stark reminder to all that early voting, whether by mail or in person, is the best way to ensure successful voting.