Maricopa County Prepares for Another Election Under the Microscope

One of the largest voting districts in the United States — and the most populous in the swing state of Arizona — voted for Joe Biden in 2020, immediately becoming one of the targets for Donald Trump in his claims of election fraud.
The days and weeks which followed that election saw officials in Maricopa County come under intense scrutiny from voters, the media and politicians, which one election official told Newsweek was difficult, dangerous and discouraging.
In the years since, new measures have been put in place to open up the vote counting process, including placing cameras in key parts of the election center and tours for members of the public curious about what goes on behind closed doors.
“I think there should be a healthy skepticism in each time you’re dealing with a government agency, and it helps us do things better to hear what people might be questioning,” Jennifer Liewer, deputy elections director for communications with Maricopa County elections, told Newsweek.
At the same time, Maricopa County has been forced to put in measures to keep its full-time staff of 60 — plus another 3,000 temporary workers — safe should they come under fire from Trump again in November.
Maricopa County, which includes the Phoenix metro area, has a relatively even split between registered Republican, Democrat and independent voters. In 2020, Arizona’s results came down to a razor-thin margin.
President Biden won the county with 50.3% of the vote, compared to Donald Trump’s 48.1%, prompting the latter to claim the state’s election was rigged.
While there were isolated issues with some voting machines, investigations and courts only found 182 potentially fraudulent votes in all of Arizona.
That number was far fewer than the 10,457 vote margin that delivered the state to Biden, though that did not stop Trump from continuing to make the false claims.
“Arizona shows Fraud and Voting Irregularities many times more than would be needed to change the outcome of the Election,” Trump wrote months later, after the county’s votes were given a full recount that confirmed Biden’s win.
Liewer told Newsweek that for those on her team, the seemingly endless coverage in the months that followed the last election took its toll.
“It’s discouraging to be in the spotlight like that,” she said. “We welcome the scrutiny, but we have the resources and the ability that may be smaller counties don’t have to really be able to address the misinformation.
“At the same time, we’ve had documentaries, news cameras from around the world come here, every national news [outlet] has come and featured what goes on here in Maricopa County and that can be a bit of a double-edged sword.”
When it comes to concerns about election trustworthiness, Liewer said she believed only a small part of the local population had any, and blamed outside agitators for driving the allegations.
An Arizona native who has lived and worked in the county for decades, Liewer believes the vast majority of voters in Maricopa trust what she and her team do.
Still, measures have been put into place to further secure the vote this time around.
A new website was created to debunk misinformation and give voters clear messages on how elections work in Maricopa County. The Arizona state senate published a report seeking to do the same.
Meanwhile, 24/7 cameras were installed in Maricopa’s tabulation – or processing – room, which has also been cut off from any internet access as a way to prevent potential fraud. Tours are also being offered to those interested in seeing the election process up-close.
“Some of our poll workers become national memes or their face is used over and over and over again in stories, so we try to be respectful of that,” Liewer said, adding that there are some employees who prefer to be out of view of the cameras because of this.
“There are websites out there [which] take clips of the camera footage and sort of, put their own narrative to what might have been taking place,” she added.
“We have had employees leave. Tenured employees leave their positions because of some of the public exposure, negative exposure that they got.”
A judge recently allowed the names and personal details of election workers to be redacted in public documents, in an effort to protect them.
Liewer said she and her team want the process to be transparent, but that did not mean individual election workers — regular, nonpartisan civil servants — should have their identities revealed.
In preparing for November, Liewer said that having multiple plans for anything which could go wrong, from a worker not showing up to power going out in a voting center, is key, adding that ideally these plans would be redundant.
The team also works to support one another, picking up each other’s slack.
Liewer also said it was important for her to highlight just how important and exciting election days could be.
“There’s nothing else like it,” she said. “You hear about somebody [coming] in to vote for the first time, and a poll worker will find out and then they’ll ask, ‘Can we make an announcement?’
“Then the whole vote center will know, and then they usually will applaud when the person feeds their ballot into the tabulator,” Liewer continued.
“There’s still so many of those good things that are going on that can be overshadowed by the negativity.”
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