PHOENIX, AZ - MAY 01: Protestors in support of former President Donald Trump gather outside Veterans Memorial Coliseum where Ballots from the 2020 general election wait to be counted on May 1, 2021 in Phoenix, Arizona. The Maricopa County ballot recount comes after two election audits found no evidence of widespread fraud in Arizona. (Photo by Courtney Pedroza/Getty Images)
Arizona’s Maricopa County plans to replace all the voting machines that were turned over to the state Senate for the GOP audit of the 2020 presidential election results.
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors released a response to Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs’s (D) letter, in which she questioned “the security and integrity of these machines, given that the chain of custody, a critical security tenet, has been compromised and election officials do not know what was done to the machines while under Cyber Ninjas’ control.”
The county said it shared Hobbs’s concerns and stated that the secretary of state’s “authority as Arizona’s Chief Election Officer to determine what equipment is acceptable for use in Arizona’s elections.”
The county wrote in a letter on Monday: “Accordingly, I write to notify you that Maricopa County will not use the subpoenaed election equipment in any future election.”
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The county also vowed to “never use equipment that could pose a risk to free and fair elections.”
In April, the Arizona Senate acquired voting machines from Dominion Voting Systems in addition to nearly 2.1 million ballots and voter information from the 2020 presidential race as part of a court-approved audit to investigate alleged electoral fraud.
The machines were turned over to Cyber Ninjas, a firm with no prior experience in elections contracted to oversee the audit. The company was asked to determine if the machines had been hacked or manipulated.
A previous audit did not find any evidence of voting machine irregularities.
Nonetheless, Arizona Republicans still expressed concern over the integrity of President Joe Biden‘s electoral victory. Many of former President Donald Trump‘s allies in the state pushed claims of fraud in the 2020 election.
Some Democrats, like Hobbs, have criticized the ongoing audit since it appears to be based mostly on unfounded conspiracy theories.
Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan has tweeted about conspiracy theories related to the election in the past though the tweets have now been deleted.
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