A number of voting locations in Maricopa County, Arizona, were affected by the July 19 worldwide outage, officials said. The Maricopa County Elections Department said in a statement published on its website that it is “experiencing an outage at some voting locations.” The county also advised people to visit Locations.Maricopa.Vote for the most up-to-date information about open locations and their hours of operation.
The Pima County Recorder’s Office, which handles voting, confirmed that it was dealing with the outage but stated that services were slowly coming back online by the afternoon of July 19. The office emphasized that there had been no impact on voters.
Early voting for Arizona’s primary elections began on July 3 and is ongoing for several races. The state’s primary election is scheduled for July 30.
The winner of the Republican Senate primary will face Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) to replace independent Kyrsten Sinema in the U.S. Senate. Republican candidates include former gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, Pinal County sheriff Mark Lamb, and scientist Elizabeth Reye, among others.
JP Martin, deputy communications director for the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office, told the Arizona Luminaria that they had been working with the Department of Homeland Security to minimize any disruption caused by the outage. They are monitoring the situation with county partners to ensure they have necessary support.
Maricopa County has faced allegations of fraud and irregularities in previous elections. With a population of 4.5 million residents, it is the fourth-largest county in the United States.
The Phoenix Police Department’s 911 computerized dispatch center was also affected by this tech outage; however, their emergency services remained operational while city IT worked on finding a workaround until full restoration could be achieved.
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike confirmed that this was not a cyberattack but rather a tech issue primarily affecting Microsoft Windows computers and systems. Apple and Linux devices should not be impacted.
Apart from voting systems, various sectors such as governments, hospitals airlines courts emergency services experienced disruptions due to this global outage.
