NPR: Arizona’s Maricopa County prepares to be in the election spotlight once again

Ben Giles of NPR reports on the efforts of Maricopa county officials to improve election administration.

While state law hasn’t significantly altered how elections are conducted, county officials have planned a number of changes this year to try to improve election administration and prevent new conspiracy theories from sprouting.

An election worker prepares mail-in ballots at the Clark County Election Department on Nov. 8, 2022, in Las Vegas. The Republican National Committee has filed a federal lawsuit seeking to prevent Nevada from counting mail ballots received after Election Day, as the state’s law currently permits.

For example, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors budgeted $9 million to buy new printers, replacing older models that struggled to properly print roughly 17,000 ballots on Election Day in 2022 — and led to unsupported fraud claims.

The office of Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, which is in charge of early voting by mail, also added more steps and audit cues as part of signature verification, the process used to ensure mail ballots were turned in by the voter the ballot was mailed to.

“Some of that has not been with a goal towards speed,” Richer said. “Some of that has been the goal towards increased integrity, increased eyeballs on it, increased scrutiny, increased documentation.”

But this year, he also hired more staff to verify those signatures, a step he hopes will allow the county to report more results sooner. That required building modular facilities at county elections headquarters over the last two years.

“The previous limitation was a space limitation — we just didn’t have enough space to have more people working signature verification,” Richer said.

Keep reading at NPR.