(Bloomberg) -- A new wrought-iron fence wraps around the Maricopa County office where votes will be counted next month. On Election Day, there’ll be concrete barriers too, along with plainclothes officers and mounted police.
Layers of security including cameras have been added to protect ballot machines, and no one without clearance is allowed into the rooms where ballots are counted. Arizona and its most populous county are leaving nothing to chance as they seek to avoid a repeat of the chaos that marred the 2020 election.
“I don’t ever want to be the boy who cried wolf,” Michael Moore, chief information security officer for the Arizona Secretary of State’s office, said in an interview in the county offices. “But we need to be prepared to escalate according to the situation on the ground.”
State and local officials across the US are bracing for a range of possible disruptions — including cyberattacks, disinformation and unruly crowds — that risk undermining the outcome of the Nov. 5 election. Efforts to enhance security are especially crucial in swing states like Arizona that will decide whether Vice President Kamala Harris or Donald Trump wins the White House.
Four years ago, Arizona found itself at the center of then-President Trump’s effort to overturn his election loss with false claims that the vote in Maricopa County was riddled with fraud. Trump supporters led by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones piled into the election center’s parking lot, alternately demanding that officials tally every vote or abandon the count altogether. Some demonstrators made it inside the building, cornering at least one election official.
“I don’t recall any violence, but you’ve got over 100 people there, angry, wanting something specific, many of them armed, and certainly, the staff didn’t feel safe,” said Moore.
Within days, a chain link fence went up outside the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center. Lawsuits over the election outcome quickly followed. Maricopa County has finally put the litigation from the 2020 vote to bed, officials said, but the state is still dealing with legal fallout stemming from the 2022 gubernatorial race where Trump ally and election denier Kari Lake lost to her Democratic opponent.
In the meantime, election officials have been working to build a more robust system that can withstand demonstrators, hackers and even influence operations from US adversaries. Already, Trump and his supporters are sowing doubt about the integrity of the system with false claims about such things as widespread mail-in voting fraud and a plot to allow undocumented immigrants into the country to cast ballots.
Nate Young, chief information officer at the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, explained that the computer systems used for election tabulation and administration, from vendors including Dominion Voting Systems, have added extra layers of security.
Computers are secured with cable locks and equipped with blockers that prevent unauthorized access to USB or HDMI ports. Everything has a serial number which is tracked and audited. To compromise the election management system, Young said an intruder would have to pull a “Mission: Impossible”-worthy stunt: bypassing security to get into the building and the room storing the computers, removing the port blockers and evading two separate camera systems, one of which is livestreaming 24-hours a day.
In the room where the ballots are counted, the Ballot Tabulation Center, access is limited to people with security clearance. No elected official has access to the room, not even Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, said Taylor Kinnerup, communications director at the recorder’s office.
“We have an electronic access log of every ID badge swipe in this room,” Kinnerup said. “The logs will tell you exactly whose badge was used at which door and when.”
In the corner of the center is a glass-walled room holding the election management server, which holds all the ballot results. Only three people have access to that room, Kinnerup said. Four years ago, Kinnerup was a reporter for a local radio station. She remembers covering the protests in front of the center and seeing Jacob Chansley — better known as the “QAnon Shaman” who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol — standing alongside other protesters.
And there are cameras everywhere. The livestream system was expanded and added to the county’s website in 2021. A separate surveillance system features 150 cameras, many of which were added after 2020.
“If a staff member walked in there without a buddy, we are going to hear about it,” said Young, the chief information officer.
Like their counterparts in other states, county election workers have engaged in drills that envision “basically the worst day that they could possibly have in elections,” Moore said.
“What happens if you have a bunch of poll workers that quit? Or you run out of paper?” Moore said, citing a few possible scenarios. The county has also created its own deepfakes of election officials, to make sure staff members understand how they can be weaponized in an election, he said.
In addition to their security enhancements, Maricopa County officials have tried extending a hand to voters too — offering tours designed to pick apart some of the most infamous conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 vote.
For example, to counter debunked claims that Sharpies bled through ballots, rendering them useless — sometimes called “Sharpiegate” — visitors are shown how the use of them won’t invalidate a ballot. To deal with claims of ballots bearing fake or absent signatures, visitors get a detailed explanation of signature verification, which includes checks against historical records and phone calls to voters for confirmation.
Tour guides also explain to visitors that every voter has an assigned bar code specific to that person and that election. Once a ballot is submitted, subsequent ballots from the same voter are invalidated, Kinnerup said.
All the outreach and transparency has been designed, Moore said, to keep the election secure.
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