Arizona’s Secretary of State Katie Hobbs informed Maricopa County officials that hundreds of their vote tabulating machines are unusable after being handed over to Cyber Ninjas, a partisan company hired by Senate Republicans to recount ballots from November.
If the county uses the machines again, Hobbs said, her office would consider “decertification proceedings” that would ban their utilization.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security told Hobbs there is no way to know whether the machines have been tampered with while they were out of the custody of the county.
New machines could cost the county millions of dollars.
The head of the county’s Board of Supervisors, Jack Sellers, a Republican, called Trump “unhinged” when he complained about “voter files” that Cyber Ninjas couldn’t find — but only because Cyber Ninjas didn’t know where to look, according to Sellers.
Sellers called the operation a “circus” involving “purple lights and spinning tables” and hunts for bamboo, which are “not things that serious auditors of elections do. You are photographing ballots and … sending those images to unidentified places and people,” the letter stated.
“It is time to end this,” the letter concluded. “For the good of the Senate, for the good of the Country and for the good of the Democratic institutions that define us as Americans.”