The Big Lie, Con't

The consequences of the Big Lie continue in Arizona's largest county as AZ Secretary of State Katie Hobbs is warning that the entire county's election machines will need to be replaced because chain of custody practices were absolutely not followed to protect the machines from tampering.

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said Thursday that the voting machines Republicans turned over to private companies as part of their audit of the 2020 election are no longer safe for use in future elections.

In a letter sent to Maricopa County officials and shared with NBC News, Hobbs, a Democrat, cited security concerns about losing the chain of custody over the equipment when it was handed over to the auditors and urged the county to get new machines. If it does not, her office would consider decertifying the equipment involved in the audit, she wrote. That would remove the machines from service.

State Senate Republicans subpoenaed nearly 400 of Maricopa County's election machines, along with ballots cast by voters in November's election, to facilitate an unusual audit of the election results. The GOP hired private firms, led by the Florida-based cybersecurity company Cyber Ninjas, to do the work.

"I have grave concerns regarding 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," Hobbs wrote in the letter to the county's mostly Republican Board of Supervisors, which oversees the county elections.

In Arizona, the secretary of state can decertify machinery in consultation with the state's Election Equipment Certification Committee, a three-person panel appointed by Hobbs.

The audit itself is an extraordinarily partisan effort after Arizona Republicans spent months questioning the accuracy of President Joe Biden's narrow win in the state while boosting former President Donald Trump's lie that the election was stolen from him.

The recount operation has been dogged by controversy and conspiracy theories since Day One, as state and federal experts and law enforcement officials have questioned the legality and prudence of the auditors and their efforts. The Justice Department and election experts have warned that some of their proposed processes could violate federal law, while auditors' searches for things like bamboo and secret watermarks have drawn scorn and mockery.

 

There's no doubt in my mind that the machines were fiddled with and that doing so was the entire point of the plan. If Hobbs had allowed the machines to be used again, the GOP would have pounced and said "Aha! The machines really were altered! " Hobbs would have been run out of the state if not arrested for fraud and it would have been the turning point in the "battle" to "prove" national election fraud in favor of the Democrats.

Luckily, Katie Hobbs is much smarter than that and has flipped the argument on its head, and she absolutely has the power to decertify the machines and toss them, forcing the county (and state) to pay for all new machines.

Still, expect the narrative to be "SHE'S DUMPING THE EVIDENCE OF FRAUD" and for the state GOP to try to stop the decertification somehow.

Me, I'd have the machines audited for tampering by Cyber Ninjas, but this works too.