The Arizona Senate seized hundreds of pieces of voting equipment as part of its scandal-plagued audit of the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County. Now local officials say those machines may have been compromised during the recount and they cannot be used in future elections.
“The voters of Maricopa County can rest assured, the County will never use equipment that could pose a risk to free and fair elections,” the county said in a statement. “As a result, the County will not use the subpoenaed equipment in any future elections.”
Maricopa County had leased the equipment from Dominion Voting Systems; there’s a $3.3 million dollar balance on the contract. It’s unclear if the lease must be paid off or if additional charges will be incurred. Before seizing the machines, the GOP-led Arizona Senate “signed an agreement with the county that said the county is not liable for any damages to the equipment while in the Senate’s custody,” according to Arizona Central.
Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who is running for governor, first raised concerns about the seized machines. “The lack of physical security and transparency means we cannot be certain who accessed the voting equipment and what might have been done to them,” Hobbs told the county in a May letter.
Arizona Central reports on the county’s response:
The county’s Board of Supervisors wrote in a June 28 letter to Secretary of State Katie Hobbs that they share her concerns about whether the hundreds of vote-counting machines that they had to give the Senate’s contractors are safe to use, in part considering the contractors are not certified to handle election equipment in the United States.
The audit has been highly unusual. It is being conducted by Cyber Ninjas, an inexperienced firm that is led by a man who has pushed The Big Lie. At one point, auditors were searching for traces of bamboo – a sign, according to a conspiracy theory, that fake ballots had been flown in from South Korea. The audit also has transparency problems; the hyper-partisan network One America News controls the cameras that livestreams the recount.
Results from the audit will be released in August, but its sloppy execution will likely undermine its findings for everyone except Trump supporters desperate for a win after a long string of defeats, including the 2020 election itself. According to a new poll covered in Politico, “independent voters upon whom [Arizona] pivots in close elections opposed the audit by 18 percentage points.”