Republicans question CrowdStrike outage impact on Arizona election systems
The Republican National Committee (RNC) is questioning local election officials in Arizona about how the CrowdStrike outage may have impacted their voting centers last week.
The RNC, Arizona Republican Party and the Trump campaign’s election integrity department sent a letter to every county in Arizona demanding answers about whether the global CrowdStrike outage affected election systems. Republicans have made election integrity a central part of their agenda and have repeatedly called for stricter voting measures.
The outage largely affected flights and businesses, but many government offices also reported similar outages on Friday. At least two counties in the state reported some disruptions to their voting systems when early primary voting was taking place.
In a statement, RNC chair Michael Whatley and Arizona Republican chair Gina Swoboda said that the breaches “highlight alarming fragilities” in the voting system, adding that they need confirmation that “there was no nefarious activity.”
“We are demanding information on any other systems affected, if vulnerabilities were exploited, and full evidence demonstrating that there were no breaches to determine the extent of the issue. Most importantly, we must have complete assurance that this will not happen again and that the elections systems are not susceptible to these threats during our country’s most important election,” Whatley and Swoboda said in a statement.
In a letter to Maricopa County Director of Elections Scott Jarrett, the RNC election integrity council asked for answers about the closure of multiple voting centers in the county. Maricopa County was thrust into the spotlight in recent years over Republican challenges to its handling of the midterm elections.
“Legally registered voters in Maricopa County should know when and where they are able to vote. Additionally, they should have confidence that their vote, and all other legally cast votes, will be counted correctly. This most recent occurrence is extremely worrisome due to the online nature of the issue and the implications if this were to happen on Election Day,” the letter stated.
Maricopa County Elections Department wrote on social media platform X that it was experiencing an “outage at some voting locations” due to the global tech outage on Friday. The department continued to open more voting locations throughout the day after starting with “a few" open.
The Pima County Recorder’s Office said on X that voting services were “limited” on Friday due to the global outage. Later that day, the office said all the early voting sites remained open and they returned to issuing regular ballots.
“We understand voting systems are confusing, but to be clear, voting machines are not connected to the Internet,” the office said in a statement on X. “This morning, staff could not access our voter data base to check-in voters. As a result, 18 voters were given provisional ballots.”
The Pinal County Elections Department wrote on X that some PCs in the Recorder’s Office were affected by the outage, but that the election systems were not affected. Yavapai County confirmed on X that its early voting sites and offices were not affected by the issue.
Coconino County’s Election Department and Recorder’s Office responded to the RNC’s letter, according to the response obtained by The Hill. The letter said that the county did not experience any issues with its election department on Friday.
The Hill has reached out to all the county election departments in the state for comment on the letter.