PHOENIX (AZFamily/AP) — Maricopa County officials hosted a press conference Tuesday afternoon to discuss the final steps to secure the 2024 general election. The county announced that more than one million early ballots have already been received.

Maricopa County election officials Sheriff Russ Skinner and Supervisor Bill Gates discussed efforts exactly one week before Election Day on general law enforcement operations to protect poll workers and ballots.

“We’ll make sure we’re overprepared and overestimated for any issue, but not enough to make sure the process happens,” Skinner said. “We don’t want to intimidate anyone. We just want to make sure that the people in that building are safe, they feel safe, and the community there, that there are enough personnel there to respond if needed.”

Election officials say they are actively monitoring the more than 70 vote centers currently open during early voting, which will increase to more than 240. The department previously said more than 3,600 temporary workers will be deployed on Election Day to locations throughout The valley.

In addition, the county is already seeing record numbers when it comes to early voting. Officials announced that of the roughly two million voters on the early voter list, about half have already turned in their ballots.

Officials said more than 940,000 early ballots have been dropped off through the U.S. Postal Service and about 75,000 people have already voted in person.

Election security was top of mind for many, especially after police said last week that a Valley man intentionally set fire to a US Postal Service mailbox in downtown Phoenix. While the suspect said his actions were not politically motivated, more than a dozen ballots were damaged in the fire, authorities said.

The sheriff said the county has not seen an increase in election-related threats or violent plots as it saw in the previous presidential election cycle.

“A lot of it right now has been related to threats, um, to people who are involved in either the election process or dignitaries or elected officials. We haven’t had a lot of them, which is a good thing, but we’ve seen that obviously in 2020,” Sheriff Skinner said.

Supervisor Gates explained that the county has been working to assess threats in the age of disinformation, particularly on social media and other digital spaces.

“For two reasons. One is security (…) you understand people who go out there and threaten poll workers, threaten elected officials on social media. It’s something that’s being monitored,” Gates said. “But we’re also monitoring social media because we understand that we’re now in an environment where we have both foreign actors and people in this country who are intentionally spreading misinformation about our election.”

In Oregon, hundreds of ballots were damaged after a box was set on fire in two separate cases earlier this month.

Arizona remains a major electoral battleground four years after the president Joe Biden he became only the second Democratic presidential nominee to lead the state in almost 70 years. It is one of four states in the nation’s sunbelt that has drawn much of the attention of both presidential campaigns in the final sprint to Election Day.

Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and former Republican president Donald Trump are in a tight race for the state’s 11 electoral votes. Since securing their parties’ nominations over the summer, they and fellow candidates have made several campaign stops There.

Other competitive contests include the Democratic US Senate race Ruben Gallego and republican Lake Kari is running to replace independent U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and two Republican-held U.S. House seats in districts in Phoenix and Tucson, both of which went to Biden in 2020.

In the state Legislature, Democrats hope to take over the state Senate for the first time since 1992 and the state House for the first time since 1966, the last time the party controlled the governorship and both chambers simultaneously.

The voters will also decide on high-level statewide ballot measures on abortion and immigration, as well as two competing ballot measures that would either require or eliminating the use of partisan primaries in the state elections.

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