PHOENIX (AZFamily/AP) — Maricopa County officials held a news conference Tuesday afternoon to discuss the latest steps to secure the 2024 general election. The county announced that more than 1 million early ballots have already been received .

Maricopa County elections officials, Sheriff Russ Skinner and Supervisor Bill Gates discussed efforts being made precisely one week before Election Day regarding overall law enforcement operations to protect election workers and ballots voting.

“We will make sure that we are overprepared and overestimate any problems, but not enough to ensure that the process takes place,” Skinner said. “We don’t want to intimidate anyone. We just want to make sure that the people inside that building feel safe, as well as the community there, that there are enough staff to respond if necessary.

Election officials say they are actively monitoring more than 70 voting centers currently open for early voting, and that number will increase to more than 240. The department previously said more than 3,600 temporary workers would be spread out on Election Day throughout the whole valley.

Additionally, the county is already seeing record numbers in early attendance. The authorities announced that of the approximately two million voters registered on the early voting list, around half have already cast their ballot.

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

Election security is a priority for many, especially after police said last week that Valley man intentionally set fire to U.S. Postal Service mailbox in downtown Phoenix. Although 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 violent threats or plots like in the previous presidential election cycle.

“Right now, a lot of these attacks are linked to threats, uh, against people involved in the electoral process, dignitaries or elected officials. We haven’t had a lot of them, which is a good thing, but we obviously saw that in 2020,” Sheriff Skinner said.

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

“For two reasons. The first is security (…) understand the people who go there and threaten electoral workers, they threaten elected officials on social networks. This is something that is monitored,” Gates said. “But we also monitor social media because we understand that we are now in an environment where foreign actors and people within this country are intentionally spreading misinformation about our elections.”

In Oregon, hundreds of ballots were damaged after a drop box caught fire twice earlier this month.

Arizona remains a major electoral battleground four years into the presidency. Joe Biden became only the second Democratic presidential candidate carry the state in almost 70 years. It is one of four Sun Belt states nationwide that has attracted the attention of both presidential campaigns in the final sprint before 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 party’s nominations over the summer, they and their running mates have made several campaign stops there.

Other contests include the U.S. Senate race, where Democrats Rubén Gallego and republican Lake Kari are running to replace retiring independent U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and two Republican House seats in Phoenix and Tucson districts that were both won by Biden in 2020.

In the state Legislature, Democrats hope to take control of the state Senate for the first time since 1992 and the House of Representatives for the first time since 1966, the last time the party controlled simultaneously the post of governor and both houses.

Voters will also decide on high-profile statewide ballot measures on abortion and immigration, as well as two competing ballot measures that would require or eliminate the use of partisan primaries in national elections.

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